[ipxe-devel] iPXE looping when gPXE does not

[James A. Peltier]

Thanks, I'll give that a try today. ;)

----- Original Message -----
| On Wednesday 26 Jan 2011 07:08:21 James A. Peltier wrote:
| > I'm trying to move from gPXE to iPXE and I seem to be having
| > difficulty.
| >  In gPXE the following script works and does not get into a constant
| >  loop,
| >  however, with iPXE it goes into a never ending loop. Am I missing
| >  something here??
| >
| > #!ipxe
| >
| > echo "Hi There! We will be booting from http://mirror.its.sfu.ca/
| > today."
| > echo "It is assumed that you have dhcp networking."
| >
| > autoboot
| 
| Are you sure you want "autoboot" in here? The script should never
| continue
| beyond this point, in either gPXE or iPXE, since autoboot will either
| fail or
| never return.
| 
| I assume you're trying to acquire an address via DHCP, in which case
| maybe
| something like:
| 
| #!ipxe
| echo "Hi There! We will be booting from http://mirror.its.sfu.ca/
| today."
| echo "It is assumed that you have dhcp networking."
| dhcp
| set 209:string pxelinux.cfg/default
| set 210:string http://mirror.its.sfu.ca/tftpboot/
| echo "Here we go!"
| chain http://mirror.its.sfu.ca/tftpboot/pxelinux.0
| 
| might work for you?
| 
| Also, with iPXE you could look into making the script more robust by
| handling
| DHCP errors etc. For example:
| 
| #!ipxe
| echo "Hi There! We will be booting from http://mirror.its.sfu.ca/
| today."
| echo "It is assumed that you have dhcp networking."
| :retry
| dhcp || goto retry
| set 209:string pxelinux.cfg/default
| set 210:string http://mirror.its.sfu.ca/tftpboot/
| echo "Here we go!"
| chain http://mirror.its.sfu.ca/tftpboot/pxelinux.0 || goto retry
| 
| which would cause both DHCP and the HTTP download to be retried
| indefinitely if
| e.g. the server were to be temporarily offline.
| 
| Michael

-- 
James A. Peltier
Research Computing Group
Simon Fraser University - Burnaby Campus
Phone   : 778-782-6573
Fax     : 778-782-3045
E-Mail  : jpeltier at sfu.ca
Website : http://www.sfu.ca/itservices
          http://blogs.sfu.ca/people/jpeltier