Mon 19 Jun 2006 12:40:07 PM UTC, original submission:
May be anyone knows about that:
I have a SUN X4100 connected via Cisco 3560G. The pxegrub image as well as the menu.lst are on the tftp server of the switch itself. The switch is serving DHCP and TFTP.
So, when I switch on the X4100 and the PXE boot shows up, the system gets an IP really immediately (<1 sec) and it starts as well instantly to download the pxegrub. After that it executes the pxegrub and hand over the control to pxegrub. So fine so good.
Now (what Etherreal on the monitored port on the switch shows) pxegrub tries to get an IP again, but with bootp instead of dhcp. However, that is working as well even if it usually takes a while (5-20 sec). (sometimes it is fast as well)
Now the download of the menu.lst file should start via tftp from the switch's TFTP server. That process starts, but has several retries and in 75% it is successful after round about 5min to get the 495 byte from the TFTP and display the menu.
Then the system is going via timeout 8 after 8 seconds to boot the default configuration from the menu.lst file. Unfortunately again the try to get IP from the DHCP server, a mass of ARP packages and finally silence. The monitor show up the first line "Booting 'X4100'
root (nd)
Filesystem type is tftp, using whole disk
kernel (nd)/PXE/vmlinuz ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb
"
and thats it. Nothing more, nothing else.
My config is grub-0.97.tar.gz with grub-0.97-nic_update-2.patch
it was compiled with configure --enable-diskless --enable-pci-direct --enable-e1000
the switch is configured to Gigabit full duplex.
'--enable-pci-direct' is necessary to get access to one of the four onboard Intel Gigabit interfaces (may be because the system bus is PCI-X).
My own analysis is, that grub does only a bootp request, even if you explicitely say dhcp in the menu.lst. May be that bootp is not as performant as dhcp. On the other hand is dhcp based on dhcp. BTW: nothing changed if I assign the IP fix via ifconfig in the menu.lst config file.
Why the system is loading the first file 'pxegrub' on very fast speed and the much smaller 'menu.lst' file afterwards so slow?
Anyone has an idea???
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