How2 set up a tftp server for PXELinux
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March 2004, @Frank4DD

1. Example Suse Linux Professional 9.0
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check with yast2 if xinetd and tftpd packages are installed:

tftp (93KB)
xinetd (285KB) (needed for tftpd configuration with yast2)

2. configure tftp server through /etc/inetd.conf
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Enable the tftpd service and set a valid tftp root directory
(if not already configured) to - say - /var/tftp (my choice).
Don't forget to 'kill -HUP' the running inetd daemon.
Copy pxelinux.0 from the pxelinux distribution to /var/tftp.
Create a /var/tftp/pxelinux.cfg directory.
Create a file 01-00-0c-29-76-81-9f (your diskles systems MAC address
with a "01-" prefix) with the following content (life example):

bash-2.05# more 01-00-00-39-55-11-8f
SERIAL  0,9600
DEFAULT LINUX
TIMEOUT 10
PROMPT  LINUX
DISPLAY banner.txt
LABEL   LINUX
        KERNEL vmlinuz24-toshi
        APPEND load_ramdisk=1 initrd=net4.gz ramdisk_size=65536 root=/dev/ram0

If the configuration file cannot be found, pxe boot also searches
for its config file on the server in directory <tftproot>/pxelinux.cfg
with a filename of its own machine IP in upper-case hexadecimal
(i.e. 192.0.2.91 would be C000025B) and continues to search by removing
a digit of the hex string (i.e. C000025, C00002, C0000 ...) in case
there is a config file used for host groups. The last config file tried
is "default". Check that all files are world readable.

Of course in the next step we copy the kernel (here: vmlinuz) and ramdisk
image (here called net4.gz) to the tftp root directory. Note that the
ramdisk image can be uncompressed or compressed. It makes sense to
compress the ramdisk image to speed up the network transfer time.

Here is a listing of my working tftp structure:

bash-2.05# pwd
/var/tftp
bash-2.05# ls -FRl
.:
total 14234
-rw-r--r--   1 fm       staff    4411594 Jul  1 21:00 net4.gz
-rw-r--r--   1 fm       staff      11720 Apr 27  2004 pxelinux.0
drwxr-xr-x   2 root     other        512 Jun 26 10:39 pxelinux.cfg/
-rw-r--r--   1 fm       staff     970299 May  8  2004 vmlinuz24
-rw-r--r--   1 fm       staff     974987 May 15  2004 vmlinuz24-ss51
-rw-r--r--   1 fm       staff     867316 May 21  2004 vmlinuz24-toshi

./pxelinux.cfg:
total 16
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     other         10 May 21  2004 01-00-00-39-55-11-8f -> toshi.conf
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     other          9 May 11  2004 01-00-0d-87-9f-f2-f1 -> 4img.conf
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     other          9 Jun 12 11:58 01-00-0d-87-b2-01-25 -> 4img.conf
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     other          9 Jun 26 10:39 01-00-0d-87-c2-2c-ca -> 4img.conf
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     other          9 May 15  2004 01-00-30-1b-ab-24-f9 -> ss51.conf
-rw-r--r--   1 root     other        192 May 11  2004 4img.conf
-rw-r--r--   1 root     other        197 May 15  2004 ss51.conf
-rw-r--r--   1 root     other        179 May 21  2004 toshi.conf

Literature

PXELINUX.0 	http://syslinux.zytor.com/
PXELINUX.IMG.GZ	http://www.intra2net.com/opensource/diskless-howto/