# Problem With isc-dhcpd and Diskless Booting



## wright546 (Sep 26, 2021)

Hello Everyone,

My end goal is to install FreeBSD on a workstation via UEFI PXE booting.   I'm following instructions in the links below.

I have a server set up running TFTP and NFS, and a workstation in UEFI mode with "secure boot" disabled.

The problem I'm having is that isc-dhcpd does not seem to be passing the "root-path" option to the workstation.  After I network boot the workstation, I check the server where I have TFTP running and see in /var/log/xferlog that the workstation successfully got the "pxeboot" file from TFTP.  But then the workstation never reaches out for any files in the "root-path" via TFTP or NFS.  The xferlog doesn't show anything, and I'm running tcpdump on port 111/809/895 to get NFS traffic but there is none.

In dhcpd.conf I've tried all 3 of these entries, same result each time.  I tried it in the global section and in the 192.168.1.0 scope section.

```
filename "FreeBSD/boot/pxeboot";
if exists user-class and option user-class = "FreeBSD" {
    option root-path "/FreeBSD"; 
    #option root-path "tftp://192.168.1.10/FreeBSD/"; 
    #option root-path "192.168.1.10:/tftproot/FreeBSD" ; 
}
```
I verified that I can manually download the pxeboot file via TFTP, which I probably didn't need to do since I saw it was working in xferlog.  I also manually mounted the nfs share and copied a few files just as a test, and that worked.

I've been running tcpdump on port 67 and 68 on the server to capture the dhcp transactions.  I see the "next-server" and "filename" options being offered, but I don't see the "root-path" option at all.









						Chapter 33. Advanced Networking
					

Advanced networking in FreeBSD:  basics of gateways and routes, CARP, how to configure multiple VLANs on FreeBSD, etc




					docs.freebsd.org
				








						pxeboot(8)
					






					www.freebsd.org
				








						diskless(8)
					






					www.freebsd.org
				




I'm sure it's something I'm doing wrong.  Any ideas or suggestions?

Thanks for your help!


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## hselasky@ (Feb 16, 2022)

After a lot of digging trying everything, I found that the pxeboot and loader.efi was too big simply due to ZFS support.
So I did this after buildworld:
`cd /usr/src/stand
make WITHOUT_LOADER_ZFS=YES clean
make WITHOUT_LOADER_ZFS=YES all
make WITHOUT_LOADER_ZFS=YES install DESTDIR=/vol/tftpboot/pxe0`

And now it works, with my old GigaByte mainboard!


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