pxeboot

[davidcollins001 at gmail.com]

Hi,

Thanks both for your replies. I think the top of that article applies
to me, in that I am trying to do something that I don't fully
understand!

I am fairly confident that I have the DHCP and TFTP setup correctly in
as much as I get pxeboot on the booted machine (and I have gotten it
working in linux).

So here is my understandin at the moment: At boot time the netcard
does its dhcp thing, gets an ip address pulls the "filename" from the
tftp server (which is pxeboot). At this point pxeboot executes and
acts much like loader. It mounts the nfs server at "option root-path"
specified in the dhcpd.conf on  the server, then loads boot/loader.rc
from the mounted drive, then all the lovelies of BSD loader begin.

I think that now I have this in my head straight I am able to get it
working. I tried the following in my boot/loader.rc. The main reason
for the oddities in my last email was that I didn't understand what
the .rc and .conf files did, the 3 read lines were mainly debugging
and trying to understand what was happening.

> echo Loading /boot/loader.rc
>
> set mfsroot_type="mfs_root"
> set mfsroot_name="/mfsroot
> set vfs.root.mountfrom="ufs:/dev/md0c"
>
> load -t mfs_root /mfsroot
>
> autoboot 5

At this point I still get the compter rebooting (I have gunzipped
mfsroot to avoid the bug with it).. I am not convinced that I have
loader.rc setup correctly. Where are the filenames in it relative to,
is it relative to the nfs mount point too, in which case should the
file be /boot/mfsroot? Is it possible to see an example of someones
loader.rc that works?

I have also tried tftp only pxeboot by making pxeboot with "make
-DLOADER_TFTP_SUPPORT=YES" but I don't think that I had the files
correctly located. Am I correct in thinking that in this case it will
search for boot/loader.rc relative to the tftp server path?

I found a book in my library that had a section on pxe booting, I was
sad to see that although they had described setting up the dhcp and
tftp servers they completely glossed over the actual setup of and how
to use pxeboot!

Thanks for help, it is greatly appreciated.
David