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DRBL and PXE booting in Virtualbox

DRBL Live
yhu420
2017-02-07
2017-02-07
  • yhu420

    yhu420 - 2017-02-07

    Hello everyone,
    I'm far from being an expert, probably struggling with an easy problem, but I've been stuck on that for hours.
    My goal is to set up a simple PXE server and to boot from it in VMs.
    I set up all my network cards in bridge mode.

    I cloned an OS with Clonezilla in an empty drive, attached this drive on a new virtual machine (set in bridge mode, intel card), and live booted DRBL on it.
    On DRBL, I mounted /dev/sda1 (containing the cloned image) on /home/partimag.
    I then followed this tutorial www.howtoforge.com/cloning-linux-systems-with-clonezilla-server-edition-clonezilla-se-p3 and encountered no error.

    Now I created a new empty VM. I set it in bridge mode, and gave it a non-intel PCnet-Fast III card. I pressed f12 on boot, and chose to boot on LAN.

    I then get an error message:

    DHCP (net0 < MAC address >) ....... Connection timed out (ipxe.org/4c106035)
    No more network devices
    FATAL: Could not read from the boot medium! System halted.

    So I guess my DHCP service on the DRBL server isn't well configured, but tutorials seem to get it right on the first try.

    Also when I do tcpdump -i eth0 on the DRBL server and do ping6 <server IPv6="" address=""> with another bridged VM, it shows that it recieves the ping packets.

    Do you need more informations? Do you have an idea?
    Please let me know :)
    Thanks

     

    Last edit: yhu420 2017-02-07
  • Jazz Yao-Tsung Wang

    Hi there,

    Since you're using bridge mode, are you using Ethernet NIC or Wireless NIC on VirtualBox Host OS?
    If you're doing local experiment, I would suggest to use "Host-Only" instead of "Bridge" mode.

    • Jazz
     
  • yhu420

    yhu420 - 2017-02-08

    Thanks! it worked in Host-Only mode! I'm still experiencing issues with my PXE server though, it tells me "Nothing to boot, no such file or directory", but I'll try to figure it out myself.
    Thnanks again!

     
  • Peter Kuykendall

    FYI, I'm currently fighting an issue with VirtualBox 5.x and PXE booting from Clonezilla. I created a PXE boot test client VM so that I can ensure that the Clonezilla parameters are working without needing real hardware. It worked fine under VirtualBox 4.x but broke under 5.x. It turns out there was a really bad bug in PXELINUX that was solved about 3 years ago. The version I'm using is old and has the bug. For whatever reason the bug shows up on a VirtualBox VM client under 5.x but not under 4.x.

    At the moment I'm experimenting with upgrading pxelinux.0 and ldlinux.c32 with the new versions syslinux-6.04-pre1, AND SO FAR IT WORKS!

    Real hardware PXE boots fine under the old, buggy version of PXELINUX. This was only hurting me on the VM client.

     

    Last edit: Peter Kuykendall 2017-07-03

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