gPXE booting FreeBSD?

[Rick Miller]

Hi Dan,

On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 11:44 AM, Daniel Feenberg <feenberg at nber.org> wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, 4 Dec 2012, Rick Miller wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> Does anyone have any experience booting FreeBSD via gPXE and have
>> pointers to relevant documentation and/or blog posts?
>>
>
> In the last paragraph of our description of PXE booting FreeBSD:
>
>   http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/FreeBSD-diskless.html
>
> we report that "gpxelinux did not work for us. (It hangs once a menu item is
> selected, or if more than one choice is available)." Have you tried and
> gotten better/worse/similar results? Our trial was about a year ago, it
> would be worth trying again.

Thanks for the reply and link.  We've not tried booting FreeBSD from gPXE yet.

Our goal is to PXE boot clients into a non-interactive FreeBSD
installation.  We do this now utilizing pxegrub from Grub2 to pass
environment/kernel variables to stage 2 as documented at
http://blog.hostileadmin.com/2012/05/04/pxe-booting-into-a-freebsd-installation/

Where $kernel_path is the FreeBSD kernel and $initrd_path is the
mfsroot from the release build.  The rest of the environment variables
are dynamically derived based on data stored in a database for each
host.

We want to replace pxegrub with gPXE with the hope that we can still
pass the environment/kernel variables to stage 2.

-- 
Take care
Rick Miller