Setting up a pxe server

Table of contents

Courtesy of Tim Cook
Courtesy of Jignesh Bhadalia

The content

By Tim
By Jignesh (Edited a bit by Dan for presentation mostly), Two ways to do a PXE:
1. Out of the box with linux dhcp server and a "next-server" line defined to point to your TFTP server in the dhcpd config
  - For the tftp server, create the dir structure of
  - Under here, having a pxelinux.cfg dir with a file in this dir that has file named 01+mac-address for each host that you want to boot using pxe. the file would have content similiar to syslinux. here's an example file:
  - Along with the dir pxelinux.cfg, you would need pxelinux.0 boot file. (you may have to call it linux.0). just to warn you, i've noticed that pxe is pickey about the case-sensitivity when creating the pxelinux.cfg/01+mac-addres file.
  - For each linux version that you want boot, you need to pull out the pxeboot image file out of the images dir of the installation, and serve it on the tftp, like below:
  - bhadalj@lace:/tftpboot/X86PC/UNDI/linux-install
    [12:52:23] --> ls -ld *.img
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2443013 Oct 20 10:03 fc2-initrd.img
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3227144 Oct 20 10:29 fc3-initrd.img
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root bin 4492627 Nov 2 13:18 fc4-initrd.img
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3160069 Oct 19 09:06 rhel3u6_64-initrd.img
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2535139 Oct 18 19:45 rhel3u6-initrd.img
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5423181 Oct 20 18:13 wb3r2_64-initrd.img
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2548984 Oct 18 14:31 wb3r2-initrd.img
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3104916 Oct 19 12:09 wb4-initrd.img
2. If you are unable to use the linux/ISC dhcpd on your subnet:
  - One other workaround that i have found is that you can use the older /usr/sbin/pxe (i found this on rh9 as well as RHEL3.0) binary to act as your dhcp proxy for the pxe stuff. if you start this on your subnet, pxe related requests will be answered by this machine. run tftp on the same machine, with the tftp files setup as described above. (this was the case for me because i couldn't mess with my dhcp server).
  - I've wrote this in a hurry, so i'm sure there are a lot of things that don't make sense and are unclear. but hope this serves as a starting point.