#gpxe

Welcome to part 3 of our Red Hat Satellite provisioning series. In part 1 we covered the steps required to get provisioning set up in Satellite. Part 2 covered  provisioning a VM in VMWare. In this article we cover provisioning a Docker container, an AWS EC2 instance and a couple of other useful things to…

Just a further note from my entry on day 47, gPXE boot, after the VM built, it wouldn’t boot properly. Although it said it was booting from disk, it just got stuck and never booted. I had to interrupt the boot by pressing esc and select the hard drive as the boot device. Then it booted fine.

The way around this is to create a gPXE ROM from the rom-o-matic site , upload this to your VM file contents and update the .vmx file to use this ROM. The procedure is documented here . Once you do that, the VM boots fine.

All this is only necessary if your having problems PXE booting via tftp though, so if all is good, ignore all this!!

Quick tip - Problems with slow PXE boots? Often this caused by tftp which tends to be very slow on busy networks. This is presumably in part due to tftp using UDP. You can instead switch to gPXE which uses HTTP. Here’s how to switch if your using Sateliite:

copy /usr/share/syslinux/gpxelinuxk.0 to /var/lib/tftpboot

change your DHCP settings so the bootfile is gpxelinuxk.0

In Satellite, clone the Kickstart default PXELinux and create a gPXELinux template

Change all occurrences of  @initrd > @host.url_for_boot(:initrd)

Change all occurrences of @kernel > @host.url_for_boot(:kernel)

I just got round to boot Fedora right out of the world wide web using nice service http://boot.fedoraproject.org.

What's that service? Well, you basically point gpxe (which is the PXE loader which is used e.g. by libvirt and friends) to the image offered by BFO, gpxe downloads it and you are dropped into a grub menu where you can install any recent Fedora release.

All you need to do is, drop into the iPXE prompt using Ctrl+B and enter the following lines:

dhcp net0 imgfetch http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/bfo/bfo.lkrn imgload bfo.lkrn boot bfo.lkrn

The rest is done by iPXE and the initial small image. Very handy when your local setup is currently not up to date.

Hint: Append text to initiate a text or minimal install (select the grub entry, hit TAB to edit the entry, append text and boot).

Note: You can use this method to install Fedora in a oVirt Engine environment if you don't have the most recent Fedora ISO in your ISO Domain.

Linux 2.6.18, Syslinux 4.02, nasm 2.09

I've spent the past several days trying to figure out how to add a new PXE server to our environment at work.  We have a corporate PXE server which I do not have access to, but I can request that a hook be put into place on the main PXE server and build my own.  It seems this process is typically called PXE chaining.

  Currently

CORP PXE SERVER MENU 1) Install Linux 2) Install Windows ..

  Desired

+---------------------------------------------------------------+ | | \ / | CORP PXE SERVER (10.90.1.2) +--> QA PXE SERVER (10.5.0.2) | MENU | MENU | 1) Install Linux | 1) Update BIOS | 2) Install Windows | 2) Install Xen | 3) QA PXE Server------------+ 3) Return to CORP PXE Server--+

  The best method of accomplishing this is with pxechain.com, which is part of the syslinux project.  To set it up, you need at least version 4.04 of syslinux.  Then your CORP server's /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default would have an entry like this:

LABEL qapxe MENU LABEL QA PXE Server KERNEL pxechain.com APPEND 10.5.0.2::pxelinux.0

  The issue I ran into is that the corporate PXE server is on an old version of syslinux (4.02), which has a bug in pxechain.com/pxelinux.0 that causes the machine being PXE booted to hang when pxechain.com is loaded.  So pxechain.com was not an option for me as I could not upgrade syslinux on the corporate server.

  The second option I came across was gpxe.  Turns out it works with syslinux 4.02.  To configure it:

1) Download syslinux 4.02

2) Compile (make) the package with cd syslinux-4.02 ; make

3) Go into the syslinux-4.02/gpxe

4) Modify the pxelinux.gpxe script to look like this:

#!gpxe set use-cached 1 dhcp net0 set net0/209:string pxelinux.cfg/default set net0/210:string tftp://10.5.0.2/ imgload pxelinux.0 boot pxelinux.0

5) Run make again in the gpxe directory.  This will produce a binary called gpxelinux.0 that contains the above script embedded within it.  Install gpxelinux.0 on the corporate PXE server in the /tftpboot/ directory

6) Add an entry similar to this to /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default:

LABEL qapxe MENU LABEL QA PXE Server KERNEL gpxelinux.0

  The process for creating the menu entry on the QA PXE server that returns to the CORP PXE server is similar.  Edit the pxelinux.gpxe script and change the IP address to 10.90.1.2.  Compile and place that gpxelinux.0 on the QA PXE server in the /tftpboot/ directory.