On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 12:35 PM, Michael DeHaan
<michael.dehaan(a)gmail.com> wrote:
As I never managed to get a good explanation myself in past years
when
people were asking for it, can you explain what GPXE does differently,
and how much of the normal PXE chain it replaces, and when you *can't*
use it? Is TFTPd completely out of the equation? The etherboot page
talks about legacy boot ROMs, etc, but doesn't really make the case
for itself. Not arguing
against, but I'd just like to have it explained what it actually does.
In any event, we need to be able to answer that when folks ask, and
it seems the manpage or Wiki, at least, needs to explain usage.
The primary advantage is the ability to do everything through httpd.
This gives you the ability to bypass the layer 2 restriction of DHCP
without having to resort to tricks like Cisco's ip-helper. This isn't
the only advantage - gpxe lets you boot remotely over a LOT of
different medium (AoE, iscsi, etc.). The newer versions of kvm/libvirt
have built-in gpxe support for their virtual NIC drivers, so chain
loading for a KVM guest isn't even required.
+ ks_mirror_name =
string.join(distro.kernel.split('/')[-2:-1],'')
862
FYI -- This seems to imply the distro must be mirrored by Cobbler.
It seems like the code needs to anticipate this this possibility?
Yes and no - there's no reason the http server in question has to be
cobbler. Covering that case would be a todo, but I didn't give it
priority since I believe the number of people who use the
--available-as option are relatively small. I'm pretty sure that
option doesn't work with esxi4 either (since at least 6 files need to
be copied to the tftp directory), so I figured the people who'd use
this feature right now for esxi5 wouldn't care about that limitation
anyway.