Re: etherboot + pxeboot ?

On 03/07/07 17:44, Skip Ford wrote:
> Eric Anderson wrote:
>> On 02/26/07 15:13, Alexandre "Sunny" Kovalenko wrote:
>>> On Mon, 2007-02-26 at 14:11 -0600, Eric Anderson wrote:
>>>> Has anyone successfully used etherboot to load pxeboot via tftp (or
>>>> NFS), and then NFS boot a FreeBSD -CURRENT box?
>>> I did install -CURRENT snapshot using on-board ROM of my Intel PRO/1000,
>>> since my laptop does not have optical drive. I realize that it is not
>>> quite what you are looking for, but if you think any server-side
>>> configuration bits could be useful to you, please, let me know.
>>
>> Nah, I can successfully NFS boot a -CURRENT box just fine.  It's only 
>> when using etherboot that it doesn't work (it gives an "Unable to load" 
>> error).  Loading the pxeboot file via pxelinux ends up with a BTX halted 
>> crash that I don't understand.
> 
> I just setup my LAN to do this within the last week.  I received
> the same error when trying to etherboot pxeboot, with or without
> PXE emulation enabled in etherboot.
> 
> I didn't really try to figure out why since it works fine just
> etherbooting a kernel.  Half a dozen machines here with old NICs are
> etherbooting current over NFS just fine.  No pxeboot or tftp,
> though.
> 


The problem is you can't load modules, set up loader options, etc.  PXE 
booting allows that, it is very very useful.  I've worked around that by 
setting the right magic in my DHCP server to pass the boot options to 
the kernel (for serial mode, etc).

Eric