====== 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.

===== Installing an RPL server =====

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]].

===== Setting up RPL chainloading =====

Start by [[download|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!