gPXE: much better alternative for netboot

For quote some time I wanted to try PXE booting. After all, I did wrote bootp and tftp server for ADSL modems, so how complicated can it be?

I decided to use dnsmasq as server, and added following configuration options to dnsmasq:

enable-tftp
tftp-root=/srv/sysadmin-cookbook/recepies/pxe/tftpboot/
dhcp-boot=pxelinux.0

Then, I created tftpboot from upstream Debian netboot:

wget -nc ftp.hr.debian.org/debian/dists/lenny/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/netboot.tar.gz \
&& mkdir tftpboot && cd tftpboot && tar xvfz ../netboot.tar.gz

It seemed all nice and well, so I decided to try it using Eee PC 701. And it didn't work. I didn't have any network link, tshark -i eth0 didn't reported any network traffic and all suggested that BIOS didn't turn power on network card.

I even tried lastest bios upgrade but it didn't help. I was quite sure that configuration is correct (it's so simple after all) and tried to boot ThinkPad. Which worked...

So, I had a PXE environment which worked, just not with Eee PC. Fortunately, there is alternative to buggy PXE boots: gPXE. It comes with bootable USB version which to my amazement worked perfectly on Eee PC. If you want to know all glory defailes about gPXE watch this video. It well worth your time...