[ipxe-devel] [gPXE] Debugging over UDP

[Michael Brown]

On Wednesday 08 Dec 2010 19:50:11 Vinay Venkataraghavan wrote:
> The approach that we are taking for this solution is to develop a specific
> option ROM which does not implement the full DHCP protocol etc. This option
>  rom "knows" how to communicate with this management host to download PXE
>  images and to boot these servers using these images.

OK.  You may find that the embedded script capability is sufficient to meet your 
needs without having to customise the iPXE code.  For example, you can very 
easily embed a two-line script that sends the NIC's MAC address and PCI IDs, 
the system UUID, and the SMBIOS asset tag off to a CGI script on a web server, 
which can generate a dynamic image and direct the client to boot from it.

If you do decide that you need to customise the iPXE code itself (and if this 
is not solely for your internal use), you'll need to publish your source code 
in order to comply with the GPL.  I'm happy to make this easy for you by 
setting you up with a vendor tree on http://git.ipxe.org.

> is the sequence that I followed at the gPXE prompt to bring up and
>  configure the networking interface correct? Is there something else to
>  this. I checked the network interface and it is pingable. Will try this
>  again though.

Yes, although you will have a subnet mask of 255.0.0.0 since you didn't 
explicitly specify it using

  set net0/netmask 255.255.255.0  # or whatever you want it to be

You can also try debugging over serial port.  There are some caveats with 
using UDP for debugging, particularly when it gets to trying to debug code 
that might touch the network device or core data structures.

Michael