[gPXE] gpxe & keeping pxe stack loaded & DOS NDIS??

[Greg Fuller]

I have gpxe loading through our ISC dhcp server to any PXE client that
requests an IP address.  All of our clients have either the Broadcom PXE
stack or the Intel PXE stack loaded into their NIC's (all Dell Optiplex
GX280, GX620, 745, 755, 760, 780's).  

I'm using gpxe v1.0.0 with the "undionly" options and both keep stack
methods (grabbed from rom-o-matic using the "undionly" driver selection:

gpxe-1.0.0-undionly.kpxe
gpxe-1.0.0-undionly.kkpxe

gpxe then chainloads vesamenu.c32 and my initial menu config file
through DHCP using the following file passed to gpxe from the DHCP
server:

#!gpxe
chain vesamenu.c32 menu.cfg


My menu.cfg file looks like this:

default vesamenu.c32
PROMPT 0
ALLOWOPTIONS 0
MENU ROWS 9

MENU TITLE PLEASE CHOSE A SYSTEM TO BOOT

LABEL localboot
  MENU LABEL Local Boot
  MENU INDENT 1

LABEL ldms-dos
  MENU LABEL Managed DOS
  MENU INDENT 1
  KERNEL memdisk
  APPEND floppy keeppxe initrd=ldms/x86pc/undi/dosundi/dosundi.1


When I select "Managed DOS" to boot from the boot menu, the dosundi.1
file is downloaded and DOS is started properly.  The problem is when it
gets the loading the network driver for dos (it uses the universal Intel
DOS UNDI NDIS driver along with the Microsoft tcp/ip stack for DOS) the
following message is displayed:

Error: UNDI API Not available.
Failure: Driver did not load, load NDIS environment invalid.
Error loading device driver NDIS.SYS
Error 7306: The driver failed to initialize.
NDIS.DOS was not loaded.
Error 7321: Network-card drivers failed to load.


If I understand everything correctly this sounds like the PXE UNDI stack
is not loaded.  

If I go back and change my gpxe config file to add pxelinux.0 chained
like this:

#!gpxe
chain pxelinux.0 vesamenu.c32 menu.cfg

The "Managed DOS" boot option loads and the DOS UNDI driver loads
without any problems.  

Can't I do all of this "natively" within gpxe without having to chain
pxelinux.0 to get it to work properly?  Thanks for any help you can
provide!  

--greg


Gregory A. Fuller - CCNA
Network Manager
State University of New York at Oswego
http://www.oswego.edu/~gfuller