[gPXE] gpxe user confusion

[Joshua Oreman]

On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 12:38 PM, das_deniz <dhbahi at gmail.com> wrote:
> patient pxe people,
>
> after months of usage -- pretty much as described here
> http://etherboot.org/wiki/httpboot --  we were recently pushed out of
> our comfort zone (read as "gpxe times out at dhcp net0 on new hardware
> HP ProLiant BL460c G6 Server) and have thus been pests on IRC.
>
> to sum up our new points of confusion:
>
> 1) if we're chaining, as described here, http://etherboot.org/wiki/pxechaining,
> and not burning gPXE ROMs for NICs, are we always using the UNDI
> driver ?

Yes. Booting with undionly.kpxe or undionly.kkpxe boots a gPXE with an
UNDI driver only (hence the name).

> 2) we're building an embedded gpxe script into our image much like
> what is available in syslinux gpxe sources.
>
>    make -C src bin/undionly.kkpxe NO_WERROR=1 EMBEDDED_IMAGE=../
> pxelinux.gpxe,../../core/pxelinux.0
>
> where pxelinux.gpxe is our #!gpxe script and core/pxelinux.0 is the
> syslinux image
>
> kkpxe is good as we'd like to have iSCSI keep-san 1 for some installs
> that don't provide native support in the OS
>
> the question here is are we undionly or is it trying to use native
> drivers when the result of this build is served to the PXEBOOT client.

That's undionly too. kkpxe versus kpxe makes no difference with
respect to keep-san; the only differences are that kkpxe uses slightly
more memory, may work on some systems where kpxe doesn't (or vice
versa) due to vendor PXE bugs, and allows you to say "set use-cached
1" before DHCP in order to avoid performing another DHCP request.

Have you tried saying "ifstat" after the timed-out DHCP (see if the RX
count is nonzero), or compiling with DEBUG=dhcp? Both would be useful
in figuring out what's going wrong.

-- Josh

>
> thank you for your help and patience.
>
> d.
>
>
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