[syslinux] Failing to get pxechain.com working, SYSLINUX 3.86.

Andrew Stuart
2011-07-27T01:15:25Z

To start, I know I need to upgrade SYSLINUX, but since we are using the
CMenu's it's not that easy of an upgrade. I have been (slowly) working
on a new iPXE/pxelinux 4.04 install that I am migrating to.

However, I have an interesting problem. Using any of the examples I have
seen, I can not make pxechain.com work.

"pxechain.com ::/path/pxelinux.0"
"pxechain.com ::path/pxelinux.0"
"pxechain.com 192.168.1.12::/path/pxelinux.0"
"pxechain.com 192.168.1.12::path/pxelinux.0"

Having seen a thread where it appears pxechain.com is interchangeable, I
tried the one from 4.04, with no difference.

I escape from my CMenu to the boot prompt:

boot: pxechain.com 192.168.1.12::path/pxelinux.0

and it appeared nothing happened, assuming it was a vmware issue, I
tried on a few hardware based systems with the same results.

Now, for the interesting part:  I got distracted, walked away for 15
minutes, came back and found:

boot: pxechain.com 192.168.1.12::path/pxelinux.0
Could not find kernel image: 67.215.65.132::path/pxelinux.0
boot:
Booting from local disk ...
(etc)

I have repeated this with all the above examples, it takes roughly 10
minutes before getting that response. in tftpd's xferlog nothing is
logged until it gets the above, then it logs pxechain.com

I'm running hpa's tftpd on FreeBSD 8.2 x86, this is an old working
setup, all other apps working great, I just have one specific app that
needs to be launched with it's own path, I have tested this specifically
with pxelinux.0 from 3.86/4.04 in path/ to verify it wasn't the programs
fault. also server address is 192.168.1.12, and is not multihomed

Now, 67.215.65.132 is opendns' landing page for all their redirects for
invalid domains/etc. Anyone have any clues as to whats going wrong here?
Why is opendns' landing page coming up? is pxechain attempting to do a
dns lookup that is failing? I do have opendns' servers setup as
forwarders for my local dns servers.

I haven't tried to rebuild pxechain.com with debug support as I don't
know anything about assembly, and I'm not sure compiling it under
FreeBSD is going to work (assuming it should?!?!)..

Besides sniffing/debug build of pxechain, any other suggestions? I will
work on trying to get something setup to do this in case it's the only
response.

-Andrew