Centos – PXE Boot FreeBSD ISO from a Linux PXE server

centosfreebsdpxe-boot

I have a working PXE boot server running on CentOS 5.5 that works perfectly for any flavor of Linux. I'm trying to add FreeBSD to the install options as a ISO memdisk, but so far nothing is working out. When I try to boot, I get the following:

Loading memdisk....Ready
MEMDISK 3.11 2005-09-02 Copyright 2001-2005 H. Peter Anvin
MEMDISK: No ramdisk image specified

Snippit from my /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default. The CentOS install works fine, but the FreeBSD one fails.

default menu.c32
prompt 0
timeout 300
ONTIMEOUT local

MENU TITLE PXE Menu

LABEL CentOS 6.0 x86_64 NO KS eth0
        MENU LABEL CentOS 6.0 x86_64 NO KS eth0
        KERNEL images/centos/x86_64/6.0/vmlinuz nofb text
        APPEND initrd=images/centos/x86_64/6.0/initrd.img ramdisk_size=100000 ksdevice=eth0 

LABEL FreeBSD 9.0 NO KS eth0
        MENU LABEL FreeBSD9.0 AMD64
        kernel memdisk
        append iso
        initrd images/freebsd_isos/FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso

I've tried "append iso raw", "append iso" and "append raw", but it does not appear to make any difference. I've also tried using the FreeBSD Memstick .img file and "append raw", but same results.

Best Answer

So, /tftpboot/images/freebsd_isos/FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso exists correct?

LABEL FreeBSD 9.0 NO KS eth0
        MENU LABEL FreeBSD9.0 AMD64
        LINUX /memdisk
        APPEND iso
        INITRD /tftpboot/images/freebsd_isos/FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso

This should work. It's of the format of what I have used.

Related Solutions

Centos – one-time PXE boot from Linux on HP Proliant hardware

This should be possible with ipmitool. Just run:

ipmitool chassis bootdev pxe

And your next boot should be a PXE boot.

Edit: This doesn't seem to work for HP iLO2. However, you can SSH in to the iLO2 interface and reconfigure it there by issuing

set /system1/bootconfig1/bootsource5 bootorder=1

On systems that don't support booting from USB key it will be bootsource4 instead. For complete details, see the iLO2 Scripting Reference

You can issue this command as an argument to ssh and that should work as well.

PXE Boot – How to Boot FreeBSD ISO from pxelinux Server

I don't know FOG, but it should work just fine if the image can boot from NFS (which is probably going to be the sticking point for the rolled releases like pfSense). You should be able to follow the basic instructions in the handbook and get it working.

I'd also consider just running a virtual machine to test these things out. QEmu runs great on fBSD.

Edit: If you're familiar with the parts, here's a Quick and Dirty FreeBSD PXEBoot Guide.
If you're not so familiar, then the Handbook's Diskless Operation section is more of a walk through.

A brief overview of the steps:
You set your computer to PXE boot from it's network card. This is usually a bios option.
Set DHCP Options on your DHCP server to tell PXE where to find FreeBSD's loader (pxeboot).
The DHCP Options also tell the Loader where to find the root file system (an NFS share).
The loader mounts the NFS Root File System, finds the Kernel, and boots normally from there.
(Note, the kernel needs to support booting from an NFS share, which is not normally compiled in)

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