Failure to PXE boot SystemRescueCD 6.3

Question

I have successfully installed PXE Server and managed to boot and install CentOS OS from it. However, when i tried to configure to boot SystemRescueCD i constantly get stuck at:

:: Mounting '/dev/disk/by-label/' to '/run/archiso/bootmnt'
Waiting 30 seconds for device /dev/disk/by-label/ ...
ERROR: '/dev/disk/by-label/' device did not show up after 30 seconds...

I get dropped to shell and path /dev/disk/by-label doesn't even exists, which begs me to think that it did not even load the proper image.

This is pxelinux.cfg/default file

default menu.c32
prompt 0
timeout 30

MENU TITLE Linux Installation Menu
LABEL centos7_x64_vps
MENU LABEL CentOS 7 X64 - VPS
KERNEL networkboot/vmlinuz
APPEND initrd=networkboot/initrd.img inst.repo=ftp://devbox.server.net/pub/CentOS7 ks=ftp://devbox.server.net/pub/CentOS7/centos7-vps.cfg

LABEL centos7_x64_phy
MENU LABEL CentOS 7 X64 - Physical
KERNEL networkboot/vmlinuz
APPEND initrd=networkboot/initrd.img inst.repo=ftp://devbox.server.net/pub/CentOS7 ks=ftp://devbox.server.net/pub/CentOS7/centos7-phy.cfg

LABEL centos7_x64_manual
MENU LABEL CentOS 7 X64 - Manual
KERNEL networkboot/vmlinuz
APPEND initrd=networkboot/initrd.img method=ftp://devbox.server.net/pub/CentOS7 devfs=nomount

LABEL sysresccd
MENU LABEL SystemRescueCD - Live Linux
KERNEL sysresccd/boot/x86_64/vmlinuz
INITRD sysresccd/boot/intel_ucode.img,sysresccd/boot/amd_ucode.img,sysresccd/boot/x86_64/sysresccd.img
APPEND archisobasedir=sysresccd archiso_http_srv=http://172.168.1.11/ checksum
SYSAPPEND 1

During boot i normally get loading messages like:

Loading sysrescuecd/boot/x86_64/vmlinuz........
Loading sysrescuecd/boot/intel_ucode.img.....
Loading sysrescuecd/boot/amd_ucode.img...
Loading sysrescuecd/boot/x86_64/sysresccd.img.............................

But i cannot figure out why it cannot boot it. I tried to sniff the traffic and it did not even try to contact http server to download squashfs. HTTP server is normally visible and i can download files manually without issue.

Answer 1

I had this exact same issue playing around with pxe and system rescue cd. It turns out that it's ignoring your http arguments and falling through to the local iso mount/boot code, which of course is not defined.

the "SYSAPPEND" option is only valid in syslinux 5.10+, i think our version of pxelinux.0 bootloader is older than that and thus did not recognize the option. You can change to "IPAPPEND 1" which is what I did, or upgrade pxelinux.0

The root issue here is the pxe_http hook is expecting an "ip" key value on the kernel args, which is provided by SYSAPPEND/IPAPPEND. without this set, it ignores all of the http code.

See: https://github.com/rcrowley/archiso/blob/master/archiso/initcpio/hooks/archiso_pxe_http

and https://wiki.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=SYSLINUX#SYSAPPEND_bitmask