[CentOS] pxebooting

Thu Sep 18 20:23:52 UTC 2014
Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>

On Thu, 18 Sep 2014, Tom Bishop wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 2:10 PM,  <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote:
>>> The gPXE bootloader can fetch files from an arbitrary network host
>>> using TFTP, NFS, HTTP, etc, but the standard syslinux PXE bootloader
>>> cannot.
>>
>>> On CentOS 6, the syslinux-nonlinux package includes both. If you
>>> specify "filename gpxelinux.0" in your DHCP setup, and ensure that the
>>> gpxelinux.0 image is in your tftp root directory, you should be OK.
>>
>> Are you saying that I only need to change the dhcpd configuration, from
>>     allow booting;
>>         allow bootp;
>>         filename "pxelinux.0";
>>    <...>
>> to
>>     allow booting;
>>         allow bootp;
>>         filename "gpxelinux.0";
>>
>> and have my menus called by pxelinux.cfg/default point to the
>> http://myurl/images?
>
> Not speaking for Paul who may chime in hear but I believe you are 
> correct.  I just set one of these up last week and I think what you 
> have is close.  Given that you have copied gpxelinux to the 
> appropriate location, you have more options available to be able to 
> do stuff like this:
>
> LABEL ESXi 5.0 KickStart and HTTP
> KERNEL http://10.0.2.14:8080/vSphere/ESXi_5.0/MBOOT.C32
> APPEND -c http://10.0.2.14:8080/vSphere/ESXi_5.0/BOOT.CFG
> ks=http://10.0.2.14:8080/vSphere/ESXi_5.0/ks.cfg +++
> IPAPPEND 1

I think Tim knows his way around the syslinux utilities better than I 
do, but, yes, changing the "filename" argument to "gpxelinux.0" 
(assuming it's in your tftp root directory) is all it takes to get 
remote-network support into the pre-execution stack.

I don't know if it has a dns resolver, so using IP addresses like in 
Tim's examples is probably the safe route to take.

-- 
Paul Heinlein
heinlein at madboa.com
45°38' N, 122°6' W