Replying to my own message again, I tried booting the same configuration on the raw computer hardware (as opposed to vmware). On the raw computer hardware, pxeboot correctly loads a kernel and boots it. This seems to imply that pxeboot and vmware 8.x don't play well together.
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 1:27 AM, Zaphod Beeblebrox <zbee...@gmail.com> wrote: > Replying to my own message, I add more below... > > On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 8:44 PM, Zaphod Beeblebrox <zbee...@gmail.com> wrote: >> I have had diskless FreeBSD machines before. I started this project >> with an eye to booting iscsi disks, but there seems to be no way to >> communicate the root disk path (and parameters) to FreeBSD --- >> something that might be solvable, but I need practical at the moment. >> So I fall back on NFS diskless with PXE boot (I may have used >> etherboot in the past --- it's been awhile). >> >> Anyways... this attempt is made with FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE binaries. >> >> In my network, 192.168.0.1 is the DHCP and TFTP server. 192.168.0.52 >> is my NFS server. The new vmware guest is bridged and gets >> 192.168.0.135. It successfully gets 'pxeboot' onto the vmware guest >> --- pxeboot prints it's banner. Then the only network traffic I >> observe is DHCP Discover (vmware, presumably the pxeboot binary) >> followed by DHCP Offer (192.168.0.1 again) and this repeats. >> >> Now the dhcp offer gives a root path of >> "192.168.0.52:/vr/diskless/hit" ... and I've tried it with and without >> a trailing slash. >> >> Obviously this is something within the pxeboot's binary as no attempt >> to make the nfs mount occurs. > > ... With a few more variations of this test, I came across a > configuration where the pxeboot client loaded into the vmware system > would continue to spam the "options next-server" host to mount "/" ... > interestingly here, it seems to completely ignore "options root-path" > ... both the ip address and the path portions alike. > > ... but said behavior only occurs with some set of random > configuration changes on the returned DHCP packets and/or slightly > different versions of pxeboot (which I've pulled from various hosts > from 8.x through the 9.x that I'm trying to boot with. > > It strikes me that the pxeboot process is hanging somewhere ... or > overwriting memory ... or somesuch ... on this box. > > Has anyone seen or investigated this type of behavior? _______________________________________________ freebsd-net@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-net To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-net-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
