pxeboot, NFS and root-path: bug or documentation error?
Brian Candler
B.Candler at pobox.com
Fri Jun 24 17:03:21 GMT 2005
I have been setting up a pxeboot "jumpstart" environment for FreeBSD 4.11,
following the instructions at
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/pxe/
Rather than build pxeboot like this:
# rm -rf /usr/obj/*
# cd /usr/src/sys/boot
# make
# cp /usr/src/sys/boot/i386/pxeldr/pxeboot /usr/tftpboot
I just copied /boot/pxeboot from the FreeBSD-4.11 CD-ROM. Otherwise I followed
the instructions very closely.
The pxeboot client machine is a Compaq ProLiant DL380.
On first attempt, it got as far as pxeboot starting, and then:
pxe_open: server addr: 192.168.0.1
pxe_open: server path: /pxeroot
pxe_open: gateway ip: 0.0.0.0
Booting [kernel]...
can't load 'kernel'
can't load 'kernel.old'
And my NFS server logs a failed attempt to mount /pxeroot:
Jun 24 16:32:40 sr-mon-00 mountd[642]: mount request from 192.168.0.240 for
non existent path /pxeroot
Jun 24 16:32:49 sr-mon-00 last message repeated 59 times
This is strange; I thought that at this stage pxeboot would be pulling across
the kernel and ramdisk via TFTP from /usr/tftpboot, although the
documentation is far from clear. pxeboot(8) says:
pxeboot recognizes next-server and option root-path directives as the
server and path to NFS mount for file requests, respectively, or the
server to make TFTP requests to.
(Erm, so exactly how do I choose whether to use NFS or to use TFTP for the
next stage?)
Anyway, assuming that I'm forced to use NFS at this point, I added another
DHCP option:
option root-path "192.168.0.1:/usr/tftpboot";
This option is not shown in the example dhcpd.conf in pxeboot(8), nor in the
article referred to above. However, if I also put an entry in the NFS
server's /etc/hosts file for the client DHCP address, it then works properly.
So the question is: when pxeboot runs on the client, is it able to fetch
loader.rc, the kernel and ramdisk via TFTP, or only via NFS?
If it's only NFS, then I think the pxeboot(8) manpage, and the pxeboot
article, ought to be updated. If it *can* use TFTP, does anyone have any
suggestions for what I was doing wrong?
Regards,
Brian Candler.
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