[ipxe-devel] Curious routing problem with iPXE

[Lee Bradshaw]

I found late last night that my workaround didn't always work around the
problem; Windows doesn't always take the static route as its first
preference.

But there's always another way to flay a feline, and I enabled routing on
the server and configured DHCP to hand out the server's address as the
gateway for iPXE requests from the client. My unnecessary hop is now through
an 8 core server with two teamed 1Gb NIC's when browsing the internet,
rather than through a cheap ADSL modem on a 100Mb segment when accessing my
disks. You certainly notice the difference.

The iBFT approach sounds interesting. Anything that will make it 'just work'
will always get my vote.

Lee.

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Brown [mailto:mbrown at fensystems.co.uk] 
Sent: Thursday, 10 February 2011 11:45 PM
To: ipxe-devel at lists.ipxe.org
Cc: Andrew Bobulsky; lee at witsend.id.au
Subject: Re: [ipxe-devel] Curious routing problem with iPXE

On Thursday 10 Feb 2011 01:46:36 Andrew Bobulsky wrote:
> The only workaround I'm aware of is to establish a default gateway 
> sometime *after* the iSCSI connection is in place and the client's 
> routing table is initially populated.  If you boot with no default 
> gateway, you can then add one once the OS is online, and the 
> trickle-down from the iBFT won't occur.

I suspect this should be possible to work around in sanbootconf.  We should
be able to configure the TCP/IP stack with the correct gateway address (as
we already do) and then replace the gateway address in the iBFT with the
target IP address (assuming that it really *is* in the same subnet).  That
should cause Windows to set up the iSCSI target route 'correctly'.

For Windows versions where the boot-capable iSCSI initiator includes its own
iBFT driver (iscsibp.sys), i.e. every version other than XP, it would also
be necessary to ensure that sanbootconf.sys loads before iscsibp.sys.

Michael