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!