We have been network booting FreeBSD for some time with pxeboot. So I am confident that we have the dhcpd.conf and the root filesystem sufficient for diskless booting. But now we would like to have menu of OSs to boot and got the idea somewhere that gpxelinux could do that for us. We copied gpxelinux.0 from the syslinux-4.02 distribution and replaced pxeboot with "gpxelinux" in the dhcpd.conf file. Indeed with a configuration file in pxelinux.cfg like this:

  default freebsd
  label freebsd
    PXE pxeboot

and the root path still specified as a DHCP option, FreeBSD 8.1 does boot. If I replace the first line with:

  UI menu.c32

the client does display the menu and but if one hits return to select the single item offered the client merely hangs for a minute, then announces "boot failure". I am guessing that once the UI is interposed, somehow the root path isn't getting transmitted to pxeboot. All the other gpxelinux boot kernels seem to expect the information about the root filesystem to be specified in the pxelinux.cfg file, rather than in dhcpd.conf. Does anyone have experience with this? FreeBSD isn't mentioned anywhere I can find in the syslinux or gpxelinux documentation, and the various web posting I have found linking FreeBSD to gpxelinux are all about do installations of iso files over the net.

Daniel Feenberg
NBER
http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/FreeBSD-diskless.html

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