[xcat-user] Making xnba.kpxe boot from a local disk

[Luis M. S. <lui...@gm...>]

Dear all,

I'm using xCAT to manage my cluster but, unfortunately, some of our HP
machines do not seem to boot from the "next boot device" when xCAT
creates a gpxe config that just "exists" (which is the default
behavior after we issue a rinstall command, right after the
installation has finished).

So i'm trying to create a gpxe configuration to boot from the local
disk instead.

While playing around with the configs, i think i finally nailed it BUT
it still doesn't seem to work as expected:
[root@xcat nodes]# cat l08
#!gpxe
#boot localdisk
 set 209:string xcat/xnba/nodes/default
 set 210:string http://${next-server}/tftpboot/
 imgfetch -n pxelinux.0 http://${next-server}/tftpboot/xcat/pxelinux.0
 imgload pxelinux.0
 imgexec pxelinux.0

[root@xcat nodes]# cat default
DEFAULT localdisk
LABEL localdisk
        LOCALBOOT 1
[root@xcat nodes]#

This makes gpxe load pxelinux, get the default config and boot from
the local disk (i even see a message stating "Booting from localdisk")
but, right after that, i see another message stating something like
"press ctrl+b to specify gpxe boot options" and then the network boot
rom fails and, supposedly, should try to boot from the next device (my
disk!) but it does not.

As a test, i tried setting the disk as the first boot device right
after the installation has finished and it boots just fine!
So this makes me think that loading GPXE messes something up "in the
BIOS" and that is why it cannot boot from the local disk...

Has anybody ever seen a similar behavior? Any thoughts?

Thank you,
Luis