pxeboot

[Marcel Moolenaar]

On Jul 20, 2010, at 9:02 AM, Marc Lörner wrote:

> Hello List,
> I want to boot one of my ia64-boxes via PXE.
> With the help of google I found configuration settings that 
> now allow me to get the loader.efi over the network.
> Unfortunately it seems that the loader doesn't find the
> kernelfile in a directory also populated over tftp.
> 
> So does anyone know whether pxebooting works with loader and
> ia64 and if yes, what configurations I have to set?

Netbooting is based on NFS. The loader is fetched over TFTP,
but after that the loader wants to use NFS only.

On the client, no configuration is needed other than selecting
the network as the default/current device. The loader will use
DHCP/BOOTP to obtain the necessary information.

For the server-side (in dhcp.conf if you use isc-dhcpd) I have:

group {
        filename "ia64/boot/loader.efi";
        option bootfile-name "ia64/boot/loader.efi";
        option root-path "192.168.4.1:/nfs/netboot/ia64";

        host hob {
                hardware ethernet xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;
                fixed-address 192.168.4.140;
        }
        host altix {
                hardware ethernet xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;
                fixed-address 192.168.4.150;
        }
}

This assumes that tftpd is started with "-s /nfs/netboot".

> BTW, is it possibly with FreeBSD, on the server-side, to populate
> and push a whole directory and subdirectories over the network for
> booting?

Just make your directory tree NFS mountable and you should be fine.

Note that there are machines with which this doesn't seem to
work, but I haven't found out why exactly. The above works for
me on all my machines...

BTW: Intel has a package of EFI tools, that includes a TCP/IP
stack with FTP. You can download that from the Intel site. It's
a good way of getting files onto your box under EFI or even
partition your harddisks.

-- 
Marcel Moolenaar
xcllnt at mac.com