[gPXE] Long Shot

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 11:57 PM, Maria McKinley <monstermama at gmail.com> wrote:
> Having technical difficulties. Okay, here is the correct mailing list:
>
> http://etherboot.org/mailman/listinfo/gpxe
>
> And, I am forwarding your message to them, as I'm not an expert on
> these things, I've just written up my experiences using gpxe to help
> myself and any one else that may find it useful.
>
> cheers,
> maria
>
>> On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 2:09 PM, FM <fm9 at shaw.ca> wrote:
>  Okay I'm not really clear about this.  And I'm not sure your the one to ask.
>
> I've flashed  a couple NIC's with gxpe   and can boot from  boot.kernel.org
> I've got a LTSP server up and running .
>
>
> I was under the impression that gpxe over http would be faster than pxe tftp.
>
> So I'm trying to setup a HTTP server.
>
> I don't quite get the  image part.
>
> Loading  a iso over http can't be quick ?

Can you explain the current TFTP setup?  I believe LTSP uses an NFS
root filesystem but I might be wrong.  In the NFS case, you'd need to
boot the kernel and initramfs over HTTP instead of TFTP.  The
remainder of the system will be loaded over NFS once the OS starts
booting - gPXE is no longer involved at this stage and you don't need
to modify anything.

Another way of describing this setup:

HTTP server:
vmlinuz (kernel image)
initramfs.img (initramfs contains boot scripts and drivers)

NFS server:
/ltsp/ (LTSP root filesystem)
    usr/
        bin/
        ...
    lib/
    ...

To boot your LTSP client, use gPXE commands like these (press Ctrl+B
at the gPXE banner to enter the shell):
dhcp net0
kernel http://my-server/vmlinuz root=/dev/nfs nfsroot=10.0.0.1:/ltsp/
initrd http://my-server/initramfs.img
boot

In this example my-server is the hostname or IP address of the HTTP
server.  10.0.0.1 is the IP address of the NFS server.  /ltsp/ is the
path to the NFS export.

For more information on NFS root kernel parameters (root= and
nfsroot=), see http://kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/nfs/nfsroot.txt.

Hope this helps you get started.  Before trying these commands, look
at your current TFTP setup and check that LTSP indeed uses an NFS root
filesystem.  If in doubt, post the TFTP boot configuration here and
someone may be able to decypher it :).

Stefan