PXELINUX with a Solaris boot server

From Brandonhutchinson.com

Current revision

In this example:

• RHEL 3 AS i386 will be installed on a Sun Fire X2100 M2 using PXE Boot/Kickstart.
• The PXE Boot server/DHCP server/TFTP server is running Solaris 10 SPARC.
• The Solaris DHCP server is configured for the 10.209.128.0 network.
• The client MAC address is 001B2493A27C.
• The client hostname is mrdcmap012.
• The client hostname exists in DNS with IP 10.209.128.39.
• Kickstart is performed on a server different than the Solaris boot server.

Procedure

• Create a directory on the TFTP server for the PXE boot.

# mkdir /tftpboot/3AS-i386

• Copy vmlinuz and initrd.img from disc 1 of the RHEL 3 AS i386 media images/pxeboot directory to the TFTP server.

# cp disc1/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz disc1/images/pxeboot/initrd.img /tftpboot/3AS-i386

• Copy pxelinux.0 to the TFTP server. On my Ubuntu system, I installed the syslinux package and copied /usr/lib/syslinux/pxelinux.0 to the TFTP server.

# cp pxelinux.0 /tftpboot

• Create a configuration directory for PXELINUX on the boot server.

# mkdir /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg

• Configure permissions for PXELINUX.

# chmod -R 755 /tftpboot/3AS-i386 /tftpboot/pxelinux.0

• Add a Linux DHCP macro on the boot server.

# dhtadm -A -m Linux -d ':BootFile="pxelinux.0":BootSrvA=IP_of_Solaris_boot_server:'

• Configure the client to use the Linux DHCP macro.

# pntadm -A client_hostname -i 01001B2493A27C -m Linux -f PERMANENT 10.209.128.0

• Refresh the DHCP server for the pntadm change to take effect.

# svcadm refresh dhcp-server

• Create a PXELINUX configuration file named 01-00-1b-24-93-a2-7c in /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg. For this example, I used the following values:

label linux
kernel 3AS-i386/vmlinuz
append ksdevice=eth2 ip=10.209.128.39 netmask=255.255.240.0 gateway=10.209.128.1
ks=http://192.168.128.30/mrdcmap012.ks.cfg console=ttyS1,115200 load_ramdisk=1
initrd=3AS-i386/initrd.img

Note that the line beginning with append is one long line.

With a MAC address of 001B2493A27C, PXELINUX will attempt to identify files in /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg in the following order:

Trying to load: pxelinux.cfg/01-00-1b-24-93-a2-7c                               
Trying to load: pxelinux.cfg/0AD18027                                           
Trying to load: pxelinux.cfg/0AD1802                                            
Trying to load: pxelinux.cfg/0AD180                                             
Trying to load: pxelinux.cfg/0AD18                                              
Trying to load: pxelinux.cfg/0AD1                                               
Trying to load: pxelinux.cfg/0AD                                                
Trying to load: pxelinux.cfg/0A                                                 
Trying to load: pxelinux.cfg/0                                                  
Trying to load: pxelinux.cfg/default

Links

• Configuring JumpStart™ Servers to Provision Sun™ x86-64 Systems (pdf)