OK, just to close this issue, and to express my thanks to all contributors:
Georg Baum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Am Mittwoch, 22. Januar 2003 12:05 schrieb Tony van der Hoff: > > Does anyone have experience of mixing PXE with Etherboot? What do I need > > to change? > > You have at least two options: > > - Follow the steps of the PXE howto on www.ltsp.org and use PXE directly > - Load Etherboot via PXE and then continue as if you used Etherboot from the > beginning. This is what I do and here is an excerpt from dhcpd.conf (dhcpd > version 3): > [snip] In fact, those two options are substantially identical. Using PXE directly doesn't really seem to be supported. Something I didn't mention in my original post (because it's - well - embarrassing ;-) is that I haven't been able to pursuade the customer to go for a Linux DHCP server. So it's an NT box. I have an adequate shareware Windows DHCP server, but it doesn't have the nice features of the latest linux dhcp daemon; in particular no conditionals, which rather stymies the idea of booting via EtherBoot. Nonetheless, the idea of using PXE to boot EtherBoot and from there to boot Linux is certainly ingenious, and evidently works well in in a Linux environment. However, it has some drawbacks, even in this environment. First I find the need for a conditional in the dhcpd.conf to figure out which phase of booting is underway to be somewhat cumbersome, even if there was a Windows client out there to handle it. Second, and this is my real objection, it is necessary to maintain an Etherboot image for each client NIC type, and figure out at boot time which one to download. Although quite straightforward, this presents a maintenance nightmare. The solution I have adopted, and which, so far, works extremely well, is to leave dhcpd.conf alone for my EtherBoot clients, so that they boot the tagged bzImage as built by the LTSP initrd buildk, as before. The PXE clients (identified by their MAC to be in a different dchpd group) initially boot pxelinux (http://syslinux.zytor.com/), which then loads the bzImage and the gzipped initrd. The big advantage of this is that it uses the client's BIOS to drive the network card, so there's no faffing about with drivers. Subjectively, it also seems to boot faster. FWIW, I would recommend adding an alternative pxe-howto on the ltsp.org documentation site to use this method, to supplement the cumbersome PXE/EtherBoot/Linux route. I'll write it if there's interest in me doing so. Hope this helps someone Cheers, Tony -- Tony van der Hoff | mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Buckinghamshire, England | http: www.mk-net.demon.co.uk ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.NET email is sponsored by: SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld = Something 2 See! http://www.vasoftware.com _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
