Switching to Gpxelinux

[falko]

Nice share, will have to test this out.
What is the advantage of using gpxe?

[Kevin]

gpxelinux uses http as the protocol instead of tftp. The big advantage is that items from the pxe menu will load significantly faster than tftp, which is limited to around 2-4 MB/s. In a test environment, and loaded an ISO that took 4:52 to boot using tftp and pxelinux. When using http from gpxelinux, the same iso was able to load in 14.9 seconds.

[falko]

Thanks Kevin

[falko]

does multicast work, anyone know?

[jbsclm]

I’ve not tried it, but the boot file that gets generated has the http path rather than the file path.
It must use

FOG_TFTP_PXE_KERNEL
FOG_PXE_BOOT_IMAGE

for its kernel and init.gz.

We use capone ( with a couple of tweaks ) tied to the system serial rather than multicast.
The tweaks we have mean that we get an image history for each PC, so we know if it has a history of rebuild.

[jayphizzle]

switching to the faster gpxelinux sounds great.
I’m gone through the wiki article but stuck on step 7 (dhcp).
We don’t use fog as dhcp server, this will be handeld by our ms 2008 server.

Can i skip this step and it should still work?
Or do i need to configure something on the win server ?

[Kevin]

I think all you would need to do is point option 66 or 67 in DCHP settings from pxelinux.0 to gpxelinux.0. I have not personally tried this, but that should be all that’s needed.

[jbsclm]

A word of warning, we tried gpxelinux and http in our live environment, but found that performance was much worse that pxelinux and tftp.
Looking at the wireshark traces showed lost of retransmissions, whci is well documented on the web, mainly in a vmware environment. From what I could see on the web there is no solution, so we have reverted back to pxelinux and tftp.

[wolf_from_the_north]

Hi,

My name is christophe and i’m kinda new to all this fog happening.
I tried to follow your guide but can’t get any of it to work.
i have a running configuration in VM on the latest virtualbox.
i installed syslinux 5.10 ( latest version ) and followed your wiki page.
but when i make the changes to gpxe it does not work, the dhcp server keeps booting to tftp, adjusting the links in the bootmenu config file as suggested it simply replies that the file does not excist or its a wrong path.
i tried to acces the files in my internet explorer and it works just fine.
can some help me get my fogserver up and running on http protocol please ? or indicate what i can be doing wrong ?
it seems that when de dhcp starts it denies the http protocol but on the website of syslinux they say it should support http protocol now.

help !!!

thnx

[Kevin]

wolf,

Did you run this command, [B][FONT=sans-serif][COLOR=#000000]ln -s /tftpboot/fog fogboot [/COLOR][/FONT][/B][FONT=sans-serif][COLOR=#000000]from the [B]www/var folder[/B][/COLOR][/FONT]? If you ran through the guide, steps 1-8, it will still boot through tftp until you run that command.

[wolf_from_the_north]

i did run the command and tested in my browser, got a download request and i could browse the folder contents in IE
i just tried to adjust the dhcp server with option 209 and 210 --> still no luck ?
can you help me please ?

[wolf_from_the_north]

maybe som other info
i’m running Ubuntu server 10.04 LTS and fog 0.32
also when i try to load the gpxelinux.0 trough my isc dhcp3 server is fails -> it just runs block , only pxelinux.0 works
all files are from syslinux 5.10 including the vesamenu.c32

thnx for allready looking into this case.

[wolf_from_the_north]

small update from me.
i did not get it to work on GPXE butt !!!
I got it to work with Ipxe on http

[Kevin]

glad to hear you got it working for you

[Lethal Kebab]

Are we talking faster imaging times here?

[Kevin]

Imaging itself stays the same speed. However, if you have an ISO, say UltimatebootCD which is over 500 MB, using Gpxelinux will load this significantly faster than over TFTP. Literally, it’ll go from minutes to seconds.

[wolf_from_the_north]

i can confirm that before i reached a speed at constant of 100 to 150 mbps, now with changing to ipxe i reach peaks on 600 mbps.
so kevin is right that when transfering big files its a huge change.
the change i see is that before the grapic on the homepage was constant 100 till 150 and now its more spikes but with incredible speed difference.
i think when its deploying an image in which there are as kevin states big files it reaches very high speeds compared to the standard tftp protocol.
by this confirmed

[mecsr]

I feel like there’s something I’m missing. I followed the wiki page on my ubuntu server and I get a “ldlinux.c32 couldn’t load” I’ve tried googling the error many times and can’t find any applicable fixes.
Am I supposed to install syslinux, or only copy the files?
How did you get iPxe working wolf_from_the_north? I can’t get that working either, and would appreciate some guidance.

Please and thank you

[Tom Elliott]

You could try 0.33 if you wanted. It’s already using iPXE, fairly successfuly.

[mecsr]

Thanks for your speedy reply,

I am currently working with Fog 0.32 on Ubuntu Server 14.04.

I had numerous failed attempts to get Fog 0.33 and iPxe to work on Ubuntu Desktop 12.04, Ubuntu Server 14.04, and CentOS 6.5. I feel like I’m missing some simple step. I am working with an existing DHCP server that I don’t have access to any settings on. It has worked just fine with dnsmasq proxy settings with PXE on tftp in FOG 0.32, but the imaging is slow and can only reliably image one computer at a time.

I have looked through the forums and the wiki many times, as well as elsewhere on the internet to no avail. I’ve tried multiple versions of syslinux files, tried using make or make install on syslinux (which failed everytime), apt-get install syslinux installed a much older version that didn’t work (version 4.xx as I recall), iPxe wouldn’t get past seeing the ip address to boot to and then would simply say TFTP. The closest I came with iPxe was a “iPXE is loading services” message that then quickly disappeared and booted to hard disk before you can see any messages. I’ve also tried different kernels, the stock that comes with the install, the 3.88 core, 3.14.1 made by you, and a custom version of 3.14 too. I could go on and on with my attempts to fix this, but that would take too long.

The apache error log files didn’t have anything regarding PXE errors for me, just some database errors from when I reverted to a default FOG .32 installation and had to set the mysql password in a config file. So I just tried the gPxe method again to see if the apache error logs said anything about it, which they didn’t. I took a picture of the error screen I keep getting and attached it to this message.
[ATTACH=full]686[/ATTACH]
This has been quite the headache to figure out, I’m sure there some super simple thing I’m missing to get all this http imaging fun times to work right, perhaps something that’s assumed is already done or that everyone knows and I just didn’t get the memo. Since I have all my images backed up, restarting in a whole new OS isn’t a big deal if it’s necessary. And I would prefer to have it working with FOG 0.33 if you have more advice on that router.

Thanks for the help,
-JJ

[url=“/_imported_xf_attachments/0/686_fog gpxe.jpg?:”]fog gpxe.jpg[/url]