PXE boot jumpstarting

Rat rat-freebsd at rat.org
Mon Apr 24 21:16:02 UTC 2006


Does PXE boot installing in fact work in 6.0? sysinstall has all this nice 
jumpstart/kickstart-like stuff in it, and I'd love to use this for deploying new 
servers.
It worked so nicely in 4.11. But now that 6.x is decent, I'm taking a serious stab at 
this and just can't figure it out.

I followed this howto:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/pxe/article.html

I have a /tftpboot/pxeboot file compiled from /usr/src/sys/boot and I can get the 
client machine booting from the server, and it gets through the install somewhat, 
making the filesystems, but as soon as it tries to install packages (extracting all 
requested distributions), it can't get past it. The NIC light is lit up solid, and if 
I turn on debugging on mountd on the NFS server, I can see its mounting /cdrom via 
NFS over and over.
I have the first CDROM mounted on the server as /cdrom, and in NFS exports I am 
exporting it, and in my install.cfg I have nfs=10.0.0.1:/cdrom, so this all SHOULD 
work, it just isn't.

So if this is known to be broken, it will be a relief and I'll just wait until its 
working, but if it should work, I could sure use some tips, or pointers to an updated 
walkthrough, all the docs I can find were written for 4.x.
So most of all I'm just asking if anyone is able to pxeboot and do jumpstart installs 
with FreeBSD 6, so that I know at least that it is not broken, then its just a matter 
of figuring it out. I get the idea that its not working.


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