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Change Pxelinux Versions

This article describes how to replace the Digital Rebar system provided PXE provisioning artifacts (eg lpxelinux.0) with a custom version via the "replace directory" feature in the dr-provision service.

Note that this process works for many of the PXE provisioning artifacts.

It may be necessary to do this for non-standard conformant hardware that will not correctly PXE boot with the default provided provisioning artifacts in Digital Rebar.

Should you need to use a custom PXE implementation binary, please contact RackN to let them know, as the unique hardware requirements may possibly be handled differently, or should be directly addressed by the PXE booting process in DRP to handl the system.

Solution

DRP ships with two versions of PXELinux, 6.03 and 3.86. The default operation is to use 6.03 as lpxelinux.0 with all the supporting files present in the tftpboot root directory. This does not always work for all environments. It is sometimes useful to change this. In general, DRP attempts to serve iPXE based bootloaders through the default DHCP operations. Again, this is not always possible.

The 3.86 version is a single file shipped as esxi.0.

There are couple of ways to change the operation.

First, the file, esxi.0, can be used by changing the bootfile option in DHCP server. For DRP, this can be at the subnet or reservation level.

Second, the lpxelinux.0 file can be replaced. To do this safely, a couple of steps need to be done.

  1. In the tftpboot directory, copy lpxelinux.0 to lpxelinux.0.bak.
  2. In the replace direcotry, copy esxi.0 to lpxelinux.0. The replace directory is usually a peer to the tftpboot directory.
  3. In the tftpboot directory, copy esxi.0 to lpxelinux.0.

The second step keeps DRP from overwriting your changes on startup.

Additional Information

Additional resources and information related to this Knowledge Base article.

See Also

Versions

all

Keywords

pxe, esxi.0, lpxelinux.0, replace, tftpboot, pxe boot, pxe chaining

Revision Information

KB Article     :  kb-00030
initial release:  Wed Jun 10 12:22:24 PDT 2020
updated release:  Wed Jun 10 12:22:24 PDT 2020