stateless wants pxelinux.0

[Jason Powers]

The pxelinux.cfg file isn't part of stateless specifically, it's more of 
a general "here's some boot-time parameters" file. We've been using LTSP 
  here for a while, and I know if you search that page or just google 
tftpboot +pxelinux you get a lot of docs referring to how the things are 
configured. I've seen man pages and such for it, but none are complete.

I'm trying to get the diskless version of staeless to run, because the 
LTSP local apps config is a nightmare, and I need the terminals' memory 
to handle the application being used. It has a terrible memory leak and 
I'd rather it drop one client than the whole server.

The present install of stateless is supposed to run a cron job every 
hour to manage all the pxe stuff, but it hasn't worked here yet. I'm 
starting this experiment over and running it off an nfs server to 
diskless clients, I'm going to try to install from the terminal directly 
to the NFS share and see if that works a little better, the "install it 
on a machine and then remove the hard drive" trick isn't getting it 
done, even with a clever-crafted pxelinux.cfg.

Jason Powers
Network Coordinator
Frontier Science

ps. my 'old' pxelinux.cfg/default file, which works for ltsp but not 
stateless. YMMV.


prompt=0
label linux
   kernel bzImage-2.4.26-ltsp-2
   append init=/linuxrc rw root=/dev/ram0 initrd=initrd-2.4.26-ltsp-2.gz
   ipappend 1



Carlos Knowlton wrote:
> Carlos Knowlton wrote:
> 
>> Mark McLoughlin wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> On Mon, 2004-11-15 at 11:21 -0600, Carlos Knowlton wrote:
>>>  
>>>
>>>> Okay, next question:  (and remember, this is in the name of helping 
>>>> stateless (and clueless) newbies everywhere, so bear with me =)
>>>>
>>>> I have stateless linux installed according with the tutorial 
>>>> <http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/stateless/index.html>, and I'm 
>>>> attempting to do a PXE boot on a diskless machine.  The PC is able 
>>>> to get an IP address, and then tries to get "pxelinux.0", and fails 
>>>> with a PXE-T01 and PXE-E3B.  "pxelinux.0 isn't even located in the 
>>>> /tftpboot directory anywhere. so I add it to where dhcpd.conf says 
>>>> it should be, in "/tftpboot/linux-install/pxelinux.0",  what's 
>>>> next?  how do I set up /tftpboot/linux-install/pxelinux.cfg/*"?
>>>>   
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>     I think as long as you have tftp-server and syslinux installed it
>>> should be there. Although, now that I look, I'm not sure how it gets
>>> there - neither package owns it and pxelinux just installs it
>>> in /usr/lib.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Mark.
>>>
>>>  
>>>
>> Hmm, well, I just realized that when I ran stateless-clients to add a 
>> client, that somehow, it doesn't get added:
>> "
>> [root at Server ~]# stateless-clients --configuration DemoSystem --add 
>> 00:11:11:4A:8A:21
>> [root at Server ~]# stateless-clients -l
>> Clients:
>> [root at fsix-Server ~]#
>> "
>> could this be related?
>>
>>
>> Regards,
>> Carlos
>>
> Okay, maybe it isn't related.  Though, as someone mentioned earlier, the 
> stateless-* utilities don't take long-form ("--") parameters.  I got it 
> working with "stateless-clients -c DemoSystem -a 00:11:11:4A:8A:21".   
> Maybe the docs need to be updated (?).
> 
> Anyway, what is the format of the files in the pxelinux.cfg/* files 
> supposed to be?  what parameters need to be passed to the kernel, etc.  
> and how is this stuff supposed to be generated?
> 
> Regards,
> Carlos
>