Problem with iPXE and AoE

[mcb30]

(2012-09-18 22:28)Nestor Wrote:  

mcb30 Wrote:From a very quick search using terms such as "Debian AoE boot", it looks as though you may need to make some modifications to the base Debian install to make it AoE boot-capable.

I did make sure that kernel module aoe was installed and loaded both in the server and in the disk image. Also, package aoetools is installed in both.

That may not be enough. AoE support needs to be included within the initrd, otherwise the system won't be able to connect to its own root filesystem. (Consider what happens once the kernel starts up: it doesn't help that aoe.ko is available in /lib/modules since /lib is not accessible until the root filesystem has been mounted, and the root filesystem is on an AoE disk.)

Quote:Something that puzzles me is the fact that if I boot the diskless client from a iPXE CD (burned from the ISO) at least it detects the AoE device and loads GRUB, but the same thing does not happen when using undionly.kpxe. What do you think about this, shouldn't undionly.kpxe produce a similar result to the bootable ISO?

Yes, it should produce a similar result.

Quote:Regarding packet capture, I would prefer avoiding Wireshark installation unless there is no other option, because I dislike installing graphical mode in servers. AFAIK wireshark has a GTK+ dependency, and I don't know if using tcpdump with AoE (which does not use TCP/IP) is worthwhile.

tcpdump is fine. Capture the packets using something like

Code:

tcpdump -s 0 -i ethN -w tcpdump.out

You can copy the tcpdump.out file to a desktop machine, and open it with wireshark there.

Michael