HP BL10e Setting up a Linux PXE server and integrating clients - Page 3

Overview This section presents an overview for using the pxelinux process and kickstart files. pxelinux functionality The pxelinux functionality occurs in this order: • The client machine boots to PXE which requests a DHCP address. • The DHCP server responds with an IP address for the client machine along with the address of a TFTP server and a filename to load (pxelinux.0) from that server. • The client then downloads pxelinux.0 from the specified TFTP server and executes it. • pxelinux.0 then searches the pxelinux.cfg directory on the server for a configuration file that matches the IP address of the machine. If no matches are found, it will attempt to load a file called default. • The configuration file loaded by pxelinux.0 will have instructions on what to do next. Some of the choices include boot to local hard drive, boot to an image file (floppy image), or load vmlinuz and initrd.img. The client searches for a configuration file with the IP address converted to HEX (for example, 172.48.1.253 becomes AC3001FD). In this example, the client looks for the following configuration file names and uses the first one it finds. AC3001FD AC3001F AC3001 AC300 AC30 AC3 AC A default This process allows IP groups to be used. The examples in this paper use AC3001FD, the most specific choice. 3