iPXE boot from tftpd

Why do they keep making life difficult ?

Upgraded to the latest Prox v5 and went to do a test tftp boot. Always worked before. Suddenly faced with a continuously looping iPXE BIOS thingy.

And rubbish documentation on the subject.

All I wanted was a simple 'boot from existing tftpd setup'. Easy. Or not.

So, the answer is easy, ish.

http://ipxe.org/cmd/chain

Boot, press Control + B and then type

chain tftp://10.1.2.3/pxelinux.0

No idea how to make this default on Proxmox though.

What is inexcusable is that it can't figure this out by itself and means I have to go wasting time hunting about for stuff.

Grrrrrrrr. Bloody smartarse developers.

Proxmox v4 using Jessie PXE boot

Had a bit of fun getting this running with my existing PXE setup. I wanted a non standard disk layout for Proxmox.

The Debian PXE way (stupidly) assumes it is the only distro in town so making it work with a tftp setup with multiple distros is a touch more tricky.

I assume you have a working tftp setup.

I store my image files in:

/tftpboot/images/somedirectory

I have the following directories in my tftpboot directory:

com32 > contains vesamenu.c32 etc
graphics > contains background images
images > contains directories for each distro
pxelinux.cfg > contains config files

pxelinux.0 is in the root tftpboot directory

To make Debian boot we have to amend a whole pile of paths.... tftpd is very dumb so you have to be pretty specific about where stuff is stored.

First I extracted the relevant Debian boot files from netboot.tar.gz to

/tftpboot/images/debian

In my 'default' tftpd config file I have several menu choices leading off to other menus and configs. I first added a link to the Debian installer menu.

cat /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default

# header stuff
label Debian Netinstall
 menu label ^Debian Netinstall
 kernel com32/vesamenu.c32
 append pxelinux.cfg/debian

I then added a 'debian' config file containing the following:

cat /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/debian

# D-I config version 1.0
include images/debian/debian-installer/amd64/boot-screens/menu.cfg
default images/debian/debian-installer/amd64/boot-screens/vesamenu.c32
prompt 0
timeout 0

Now you have to adjust paths/directories in the debian config files.

In my case here : /tftpboot/images/debian/debian-installer/amd64/boot-screens

grep -r -l debian-installer * | xargs sed -i "s|debian-installer|images/debian/debian-installer|g"

One last issue is the possible lack of firmware for your hardware.

I fixed this by doing the following:

# cd to the directory where you have your initrd
cd /tftpboot/debian-installer/amd64
[ -f initrd.gz.orig ] || cp -p initrd.gz initrd.gz.orig
[ -f firmware.cpio.gz ] || wget http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/firmware/stable/current/firmware.cpio.gz
cat initrd.gz.orig firmware.cpio.gz > initrd.gz

Hopefully you can now PXE boot and get your Debian installed