PXE Client and Server Samples

The goal of this project is to provide working open source samples of a PXE bootserver and PXE client network bootstrap programs (NBPs).

Support for this project can be found on this project's http://savanah.gnu.org/ page:

http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/pxe-toolkit/

Help and new feature requests can be made through the project support page:

http://savannah.gnu.org/support/?group_id=690

1. Have you read the PXE specification?

The PXE specification defines many of the terms used in this project. The latest version of the PXE specification is available at the Intel developer web-site: http://developer.intel.com/ial/wfm/wfmspecs.htm. The PXE specification is only available as a .pdf file so you will need to get a viewer if you do not have one.

2. What is available available in this project?

2.1. Patch to add PXE bootserver support to the ISC DHCP daemon.

As ISC releases new versions of their DHCP daemon, the PXE patch will be updated. Hopefully, the additional functionality needed to support the PXE specification will be incorporated in a future release of the ISC DHCP daemon and this patch will no longer be necessary.

http://freesoftware.fsf.org/download/pxe-toolkit/patch-dhcp-3.0pxe1.bz2

This patch adds the following features to the ISC DHCP 3.0 daemon:

Support for PXE specific DHCP options (client-architecture, network-interface-identifier and client-guid) has been added.
Ability to run the DHCP daemon in DHCP, proxyDHCP and/or PXE bootserver modes.
Ability to respond to proxyDHCP discover packets on UDP port 4011.
Ability to respond to PXE bootserver request packets on UDP port 4011. Both unicast and multicast requests packet are supported.
proxy and bootserver booleans added to simplify discover and request packet processing in the DHCP configuration file.
Text and data strings allowed within arrays in DHCP configuration files.
Linux only: Ability to call external C functions (DLLs) during configuration file processing for database lookups.

Other additions/changes to the ISC DHCP daemon sources included in the patch:

Example PXE configuration files included in the server directory: superdhcp.conf, proxydhcp.conf and bootserver.conf
Man page documenting new PXE options and statements in the server directory: dhcpd.pxe.5

How to apply the patch:

Download the ISC DHCP 3.0 source from the ISC web-site ( http://www.isc.org/products/DHCP/dhcp-v3.html).
Download the PXE patch.
Expand the ISC DHCP .tar.gz file: tar xfz ./dhcp-3.0.tar.gz
Change into the top level directory of the ISC DHCP source: cd dhcp-3.0
Apply the PXE patch: bzcat ../patch-dhcp-3.0pxe1.bz2 | patch -p0

Follow ISC instructions for configuring, building and installing the DHCP daemon.

2.2. Client bootstrap program sample code

http://freesoftware.fsf.org/download/pxe-toolkit/clients-1.tar.bz2

This archive contains a very basic PXE client for 16-bit x86 architecture PCs. This will be used as the starting point for other client programs. The dev86 tools are needed to compile this source.

3. What is next?

Here are a few ideas, in no particular order. Other ideas are welcome.

Simple network bootstrap program (NBP) client skeleton. This will be used to demonstrate how to create simple bootstrap programs that can be downloaded to PXE clients.
More sample NBPs.

FreeDOS (http://www.freedos.org/)
EFI (http://developer.intel.com/technology/efi/index.htm)

Better examples and documentation for how and when to setup DHCP, proxyDHCP and PXE bootservers. Including discussions about when to put everything on one machine and when to split things up. (Seeing as how I loathe documenting, this one will probably get LOW priority.

4. Miscellaneous information.

4.1. dev86

To build the PXE client programs you will need the latest release of the dev86 environment. If you use RPMs, be sure to download dev86-0.15.5 or later.

http://www.cix.co.uk/~mayday/

http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=dev86

4.2. ATFTP

I have setup and run bootservers with the TFTP daemon included in the RedHat 6.2 and 7.1 distributions and have had occasional hangs after downloading files a few thousand times. The TFTP daemon would just stop responding and the process had to be killed and restarted. I have had not had similar problems with the ATFTP daemon. Also, the ATFTP daemon supports multicast TFTP. If you are downloading the same large image to a few hundred or more systems you will appreciate having this feature.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/atftp/

4.3. Ethereal

When setting up DHCP and TFTP servers (with or without PXE) for the first time, it can be helpful to have a network analyzer available. I have been using ethereal for a while now and loving it. A couple developers added support for the PXE DHCP options to a recent version, making the traces a little easier to read.

http://www.ethereal.com/

# eof