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gPXE booting FreeBSD?

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Rick Miller

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Dec 4, 2012, 10:55:44 AM12/4/12
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Hi All,

Does anyone have any experience booting FreeBSD via gPXE and have
pointers to relevant documentation and/or blog posts?

--
Take care
Rick Miller
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Daniel Feenberg

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Dec 4, 2012, 11:44:52 AM12/4/12
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On Tue, 4 Dec 2012, Rick Miller wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> Does anyone have any experience booting FreeBSD via gPXE and have
> pointers to relevant documentation and/or blog posts?
>

In the last paragraph of our description of PXE booting FreeBSD:

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

we report that "gpxelinux did not work for us. (It hangs once a menu item
is selected, or if more than one choice is available)." Have you tried and
gotten better/worse/similar results? Our trial was about a year ago, it
would be worth trying again.

dan feenberg
NBER

FBSD UG

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Dec 4, 2012, 11:48:32 AM12/4/12
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Hey Rick,


I've managed to setup an gPXE boot where a
diskless client booted OpenSUSE over AoE
from a FreeBSD server. Not exactly what you
want, yet the setup is mostly the same for all
OS's...

My main source of info came from this site:
http://etherboot.org/wiki/howtos


greets

Arno Beekman

Rick Miller

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Dec 4, 2012, 1:24:07 PM12/4/12
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Hi Dan,

On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 11:44 AM, Daniel Feenberg <feen...@nber.org> wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, 4 Dec 2012, Rick Miller wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> Does anyone have any experience booting FreeBSD via gPXE and have
>> pointers to relevant documentation and/or blog posts?
>>
>
> In the last paragraph of our description of PXE booting FreeBSD:
>
> http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/FreeBSD-diskless.html
>
> we report that "gpxelinux did not work for us. (It hangs once a menu item is
> selected, or if more than one choice is available)." Have you tried and
> gotten better/worse/similar results? Our trial was about a year ago, it
> would be worth trying again.

Thanks for the reply and link. We've not tried booting FreeBSD from gPXE yet.

Our goal is to PXE boot clients into a non-interactive FreeBSD
installation. We do this now utilizing pxegrub from Grub2 to pass
environment/kernel variables to stage 2 as documented at
http://blog.hostileadmin.com/2012/05/04/pxe-booting-into-a-freebsd-installation/

Where $kernel_path is the FreeBSD kernel and $initrd_path is the
mfsroot from the release build. The rest of the environment variables
are dynamically derived based on data stored in a database for each
host.

We want to replace pxegrub with gPXE with the hope that we can still
pass the environment/kernel variables to stage 2.

Warren Block

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Dec 4, 2012, 3:27:33 PM12/4/12
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On Tue, 4 Dec 2012, Rick Miller wrote:

> Does anyone have any experience booting FreeBSD via gPXE and have
> pointers to relevant documentation and/or blog posts?

gpxelinux.0 is what I've used in my PXE article. The latest version I
tried was from SYSLINUX 4.04. gPXE is loaded as a secondary boot loader
because it is more versatile than the typical TFTP-only loaders. In
other words, the client PXE boots and loads gPXE.

http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/pxe.html

This is set up to boot into a menu. I have not tried direct booting
without the menu.

Helmut Schneider

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Dec 4, 2012, 3:52:42 PM12/4/12
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Rick Miller wrote:

> Does anyone have any experience booting FreeBSD via gPXE and have
> pointers to relevant documentation and/or blog posts?

I use mfsBSD (http://mfsbsd.vx.sk/) and pxelinux.

DEFAULT boot/menu.c32

PROMPT 0
TIMEOUT 0

MENU TITLE network boot menu - FreeBSD

LABEL ^1 - mfsBSD 8.2 i386 (user=root pass=mfsroot)
KERNEL boot/memdisk
APPEND raw initrd=FreeBSD/8.2/i386/mfsboot.img

LABEL ^2 - mfsBSD 8.2 i386 mini (user=root pass=mfsroot)
KERNEL boot/memdisk
APPEND raw initrd=FreeBSD/8.2/i386/mfsboot_mini.img

LABEL ^3 - mfsBSD 8.2 amd64 (user=root pass=mfsroot)
KERNEL boot/memdisk
APPEND raw initrd=FreeBSD/8.2/amd64/mfsboot.img

LABEL ^4 - mfsBSD 8.2 amd64 mini (user=root pass=mfsroot)
KERNEL boot/memdisk
APPEND raw initrd=FreeBSD/8.2/amd64/mfsboot_mini.img

LABEL back
KERNEL boot/menu.c32
APPEND pxelinux.cfg/default

HTH, Helmut

Rick Miller

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Dec 7, 2012, 7:52:45 AM12/7/12
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On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 10:55 AM, Rick Miller <vmi...@hostileadmin.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Does anyone have any experience booting FreeBSD via gPXE and have
> pointers to relevant documentation and/or blog posts?

Thanks for all your replies. Our current direction appears to be one
of modifying the FreeBSD bootonly ISO to perform installs and load it
from gPXE as follows...

The menu will appear something like (from memory, syntax may be wrong):

kernel memdisk
imgargs memdisk raw iso
initrd http path to the ISO

Once we have it tested and implemented, I'll likely blog the subject
at http://blog.hostileadmin.com/
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