RPL chainloading

If you have a large number of machines which already have a legacy RPL implementation (e.g. network cards containing a Novell RPL ROM), then you may want to avoid having to reflash each machine's network card. You can achieve this by placing gPXE on your RPL server. The RPL-capable machines will download gPXE via RPL, and instantly become gPXE-capable machines.

The Linux RPL server (RPLD) is available prepackaged with some distributions; try installing a package called “rpld”. If you cannot find a prepackaged version, you can obtain a source tarball from http://git.etherboot.org/?p=rpld.git;a=snapshot.

Start by downloading the source tree, then build the RPL-chainloadable gPXE image using

  cd src
  make bin/gpxe.pxe

Copy bin/gpxe.pxe to your RPL server, and edit /etc/rpld.conf to contain:

  HOST {
      ethernet = 00:00:00:00:00:00/6;
      FILE {
          path="gpxe.pxe";
          load=0x7c00;
      };
      execute=0x7c00;
  };

Restart your RPL server to pick up the changed configuration file. At this point, you should be able to boot one of your RPL-capable machines, and see it download gPXE from the RPL server. If everything has worked, then you should see the gPXE startup banner appear:

  gPXE 0.9.3 -- Open Source Boot Firmware -- http://etherboot.org

Congratulations on successfully chainloading gPXE via RPL!