[syslinux] intermittent pxe failure

Larry Howe
Wed, 06 Jun 2007 03:25:24 -0000

On Tuesday 05 June 2007 22:42, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> Larry Howe wrote:
> > For now, we will just boot from CD. That will give us time to look
more
> > closely at the PXE / TFTP problem.
>
> Hi Larry,
>
> Did you ever get a chance to look at that?  I'm planning to get 3.50
out
> Really Soon Now.
>
> 	-hpa

Peter,

We're pretty sure it was the tftp server. Our data center preferred to host
the tftp server on Windows, so we had something called WinAgents tftp as the
primary server. We also had a linux hpa-tftp as a secondary. It appeared to
me (and everyone else) that the problem was happening on both the primary and
secondary. However as time went by it only happened ever again on the
primary. I speculate that something was cached somewhere and made us believe
it was happening on both, when really it was just the primary. Either that,
or we just goofed up.

Now both primary and secondary are hpa-tftp. Over this past weekend I set all
the clients to automatically reboot themselves over and over. Got over 15,000
reboots without missing one. So, I'm saying we have a working system now.

Thanks for your Great Work on PXE and on tftp.

Larry