Re: pxe LiveCD setup
Warren Block wbl...@wonkity.com writes: The only complaint I have so far is the speed of download via tftp. A 236M ISO took two minutes to load, or about 2M per second. A full CD takes a long, long time. Is that typical, or maybe just the poor Ethernet on this Aspire One D250? The stock tftpd on FreeBSD doesn't support variant block sizes (or much of anything else past RFC 1350). You'll see better performance if you go with something newer. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: pxe LiveCD setup
On Sun, 4 Jul 2010, Lowell Gilbert wrote: The stock tftpd on FreeBSD doesn't support variant block sizes (or much of anything else past RFC 1350). You'll see better performance if you go with something newer. Spent some time experimenting. tftp-hpa is faster, but setting the maximum block size was required to prevent errors. Unexpectedly, 1024 was fastest in my setup. The problems can be on the other end, too: System Rescue's tftp client is not great--three minutes for 211M. Clonezilla is much better, at 15 seconds for 101M. Linux systems with netboot can boot off http (using wget) and it's much better. Twice as fast for the Clonezilla load, but System Rescue went from three minutes to only 18 seconds. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: pxe LiveCD setup
Linux systems with netboot can boot off http (using wget) and it's much better. Twice as fast for the Clonezilla load, but System Rescue went from three minutes to only 18 seconds. Etherboot/gPXE is interesting also. It will boot from http. One of my grub4dos menu entries is a gPXE floppy image with the generic UNDI driver though I haven't really used it much. http://www.etherboot.org/wiki/start ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: pxe LiveCD setup
On Sun, 4 Jul 2010, Carl Chave wrote: Etherboot/gPXE is interesting also. It will boot from http. One of my grub4dos menu entries is a gPXE floppy image with the generic UNDI driver though I haven't really used it much. http://www.etherboot.org/wiki/start I tried it last night, although it and apparently most other things hate the alc0 interface. Eventually it seemed like an NFS server would be useful, and pxeboot will start a FreeBSD livefs. But only directly, entering FreeBSD's pxeboot as the filename in DHCP. With grub4dos title FreeBSD pxe keep chainloader --raw (pd)/images/freebsd/boot/pxeboot it loads pxeboot, but then: netboot: couldn't probe pxenet0 pxe_open: netif_open() failed ... can't load 'kernel' OK So it loads pxeboot, but then pxeboot can't use the pxenet0 device. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: pxe LiveCD setup
With grub4dos title FreeBSD pxe keep chainloader --raw (pd)/images/freebsd/boot/pxeboot it loads pxeboot, but then: netboot: couldn't probe pxenet0 pxe_open: netif_open() failed ... can't load 'kernel' OK So it loads pxeboot, but then pxeboot can't use the pxenet0 device. Your goal in the pxeboot/nfs/livefs was to avoid having to transfer the large livefs iso? I won't be much help solving your problem above, just curious where you're going with your setup. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: pxe LiveCD setup
On Mon, 5 Jul 2010, Carl Chave wrote: So it loads pxeboot, but then pxeboot can't use the pxenet0 device. Your goal in the pxeboot/nfs/livefs was to avoid having to transfer the large livefs iso? I won't be much help solving your problem above, just curious where you're going with your setup. Well, yes, the transfer and also I have more than a few systems with limited memory. gpxelinux.0 works fine with FreeBSD's pxeboot, I discovered. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
pxe LiveCD setup
Is there a quick way to set up a PXE boot menu for booting into a number of ISO images? There's net/pxe, but it looks like only part of the solution. Ideally, there'd just be a minimal setup with a directory of ISO files and a built-in loader that lets the user choose which ISO to boot. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: pxe LiveCD setup
On Sat, Jul 3, 2010 at 2:07 PM, Warren Block wbl...@wonkity.com wrote: Is there a quick way to set up a PXE boot menu for booting into a number of ISO images? There's net/pxe, but it looks like only part of the solution. Ideally, there'd just be a minimal setup with a directory of ISO files and a built-in loader that lets the user choose which ISO to boot. I have been looking for this solution as well I want to boot install ISO's I wonder if we could pxe boot grub2? Sam Fourman Jr. Fourman Networks http://www.fourmannetworks.com ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: pxe LiveCD setup
On Sat, Jul 3, 2010 at 3:07 PM, Warren Block wbl...@wonkity.com wrote: Is there a quick way to set up a PXE boot menu for booting into a number of ISO images? There's net/pxe, but it looks like only part of the solution. Ideally, there'd just be a minimal setup with a directory of ISO files and a built-in loader that lets the user choose which ISO to boot. ___ I've had a lot of luck with grub4dos. At work I use it to present a menu to the PXE client. I've had most success booting .iso files by having grub4dos memory map them, so having a fair amount of ram is helpful. I've used it to boot damn small linux, puppy linux, Dell diagnostic cd .iso, dban iso, spinrite .iso etc. See the grub4dos section of this forum for good info: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showforum=66 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: pxe LiveCD setup
On Sat, 3 Jul 2010, Carl Chave wrote: On Sat, Jul 3, 2010 at 3:07 PM, Warren Block wbl...@wonkity.com wrote: Is there a quick way to set up a PXE boot menu for booting into a number of ISO images? There's net/pxe, but it looks like only part of the solution. Ideally, there'd just be a minimal setup with a directory of ISO files and a built-in loader that lets the user choose which ISO to boot. ___ I've had a lot of luck with grub4dos. At work I use it to present a menu to the PXE client. I've had most success booting .iso files by having grub4dos memory map them, so having a fair amount of ram is helpful. I've used it to boot damn small linux, puppy linux, Dell diagnostic cd .iso, dban iso, spinrite .iso etc. After a very cursory setup, it works! I took notes and will write it up in a bit. The only complaint I have so far is the speed of download via tftp. A 236M ISO took two minutes to load, or about 2M per second. A full CD takes a long, long time. Is that typical, or maybe just the poor Ethernet on this Aspire One D250?___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: pxe LiveCD setup
After a very cursory setup, it works! I took notes and will write it up in a bit. The only complaint I have so far is the speed of download via tftp. A 236M ISO took two minutes to load, or about 2M per second. A full CD takes a long, long time. Is that typical, or maybe just the poor Ethernet on this Aspire One D250? I haven't timed them so I can't say for sure. The biggest file I currently use is a windows PE .iso and it does take a bit to transfer. I'll breakout the stopwatch next week and see. My DHCP/tftp server is a Sunfire V240 with Solaris 10. I was having a horrible time with the default tftp server and switched to tftpd-hpa which helped a lot, especially with being able to remap \ to /. Floppy images work well also. I've got a Freedos boot disk floppy image with 3com's universal PXE ethernet driver for dumping and restoring ghost images. Works out of the box with every PXE client I've tried, no need to have custom boot disks with different nic drivers. One of the tweaks I did with the grldr file was to hex edit a section so it goes straight to the menu instead of cycling though the mac address variations. Then I added the company logo to the background of the menu... and ... nobody sees it but me! ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
