So I have recently decided to spiff up my network with a nice PXE system, to hold various installers, live environments, and tools. Among these I would like to run 32-bit and 64-bit FreeBSD environments.
In order to manage the selection of these various environments, I am using pxelinux (and ignoring EFI for now). pxelinux has the ability to chainload other pxe-bootable utilities (like FreeBSD's pxeboot bootloader), loading entire disc/disk images into ramdisk (useful only with systems that have drivers for it or for real-mode usage), or loading Linux kernels in a similar way to normal syslinux.
I am attempting to follow some various guides for accomplishing this task, primarily this one: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-diskless.html
The TFTP server is run on FreeBSD 12, and the DHCP server is run on a separate pfSense router. There are no issues loading anything through PXE or TFTP.
Here are the steps I attempted:
I downloaded bootonly images for FreeBSD 12 (64 and 32-bit, but I will focus on 64-bit here), and extracted their contents into a subdirectory of my TFTP server (/tftpboot/loaderpc/images/FreeBSD12-64 and FreeBSD12-32). pxelinux is in /tftpboot/loaderpc.
I set up nfsd by placing "/tftpboot/loaderpc/images/FreeBSD12-64 -ro" in /etc/exports and doing "service nfsd onestart"
I pointed pxechn.c32 to images/FreeBSD12-64/boot/pxeboot in pxelinux's config
I also placed the line "option root-path nfs://<tftpandnfsserver>/tftpboot/loaderpc/images/FreeBSD12-64" as I thought might be helpful in the manpage pxeboot(8). I also attempted to operate without this line, and with various alterations of this line including also trying tftp.
Alternate variations of these steps include placing the entire FreeBSD bootonly root into tftp root as well as changing the nfs share to point to tftp root.
All steps end up with the following results:
pxeboot loads, displays version information, and is unable to find /boot/lua/loader.lua
I have absolutely no idea how exactly to implement this, I've attempted to adapt the guide to my present environment, but with little feedback besides, can't find much mate, I'm completely stuck. Any help?
In order to manage the selection of these various environments, I am using pxelinux (and ignoring EFI for now). pxelinux has the ability to chainload other pxe-bootable utilities (like FreeBSD's pxeboot bootloader), loading entire disc/disk images into ramdisk (useful only with systems that have drivers for it or for real-mode usage), or loading Linux kernels in a similar way to normal syslinux.
I am attempting to follow some various guides for accomplishing this task, primarily this one: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-diskless.html
The TFTP server is run on FreeBSD 12, and the DHCP server is run on a separate pfSense router. There are no issues loading anything through PXE or TFTP.
Here are the steps I attempted:
I downloaded bootonly images for FreeBSD 12 (64 and 32-bit, but I will focus on 64-bit here), and extracted their contents into a subdirectory of my TFTP server (/tftpboot/loaderpc/images/FreeBSD12-64 and FreeBSD12-32). pxelinux is in /tftpboot/loaderpc.
I set up nfsd by placing "/tftpboot/loaderpc/images/FreeBSD12-64 -ro" in /etc/exports and doing "service nfsd onestart"
I pointed pxechn.c32 to images/FreeBSD12-64/boot/pxeboot in pxelinux's config
I also placed the line "option root-path nfs://<tftpandnfsserver>/tftpboot/loaderpc/images/FreeBSD12-64" as I thought might be helpful in the manpage pxeboot(8). I also attempted to operate without this line, and with various alterations of this line including also trying tftp.
Alternate variations of these steps include placing the entire FreeBSD bootonly root into tftp root as well as changing the nfs share to point to tftp root.
All steps end up with the following results:
pxeboot loads, displays version information, and is unable to find /boot/lua/loader.lua
I have absolutely no idea how exactly to implement this, I've attempted to adapt the guide to my present environment, but with little feedback besides, can't find much mate, I'm completely stuck. Any help?