Boot Server Without DHCP

[Matt McNabb]

Hi all!

I have a special need for a boot media that can be used in a multiple
subnet environment without using DHCP options to find the boot server. We
have the PXE server option configured on most subnets to find a network OS
for our thin clients. I am implementing a new imaging server and this
normally works via DHCP so I need to be able to pxe boot to this. My
question is, would it be possible to boot to a flash drive with gpxe or
something similar installed and have it request an IP address via DHCP but
then have a statically configured entry for finding the boot server? Thanks
in advance and sorry if this is a dumb question!


*Matt McNabb*

[Tim Fletcher]

Post by Matt McNabb
Hi all!
I have a special need for a boot media that can be used in a multiple
subnet environment without using DHCP options to find the boot server.
We have the PXE server option configured on most subnets to find a
network OS for our thin clients. I am implementing a new imaging
server and this normally works via DHCP so I need to be able to pxe
boot to this. My question is, would it be possible to boot to a flash
drive with gpxe or something similar installed and have it request an
IP address via DHCP but then have a statically configured entry for
finding the boot server? Thanks in advance and sorry if this is a dumb
question!

Best way is to make use of ipxe's new scripting via initrd support that
Micheal has recently put in place.

http://ipxe.org/scripting

[Tim Fletcher]

S

Post by Tim Fletcher
Best way is to make use of ipxe's new scripting via initrd support that
Micheal has recently put in place.
http://ipxe.org/scripting

I don't see any mentions of initrd in there :(
Embedding a script should work with either ipxe or gpxe

Michael has recently committed a change to allow scripts to be called
via initrd, you can now simply place your iPXE script as a file within
the filesystem, and modify (iso|sys|pxe)linux.cfg to include "APPEND
initrd=script.ipxe".

The commit is here:

http://git.ipxe.org/ipxe.git/commitdiff/27fdb95

[Tim Fletcher]

Thanks for the response guys! I'm mostly a Windows guy (sorry!) and
while I think the scripting part would be easy enough to learn, I
don't think I can invest the time to learn how to compile a Linux
image from source. Is it possible to add a script to an existing image
of ipxe?

I've made a raw disk image with latest syslinux and ipxe setup on it.

http://co-lo.night-shade.org.uk/~tim/ipxe.syslinux.img.gz

It is a bootable 16MB raw disk image, which if you write to a memory
stick you can boot from it.

There is a file on there called script.ipxe which currently has an
example of an iscsi boot script but you can edit to do want you need.

To write the disk out under windows use http://www.winimage.com/

It's compressed with gzip so you will need to use something like 7zip to
extract it.