PXE boot with 2 NICs

[Bruce Ferrell]

On 1/13/20 5:35 AM, Daniel Feenberg wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, 12 Jan 2020, Bruce Ferrell wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 1/12/20 11:15 AM, Daniel Feenberg wrote:
>>>
>>> Is it possible to PXE boot from 1 NIC, and then switch all (or most) network traffic to the other NIC? I have a Gigabyte motherboard (R182-Z90) 
> (that won't PXE boot from an add-in card)...
>
>> You have a bad flash image for the NIC you're trying the PXE boot on.
>
> We did reflash one of the NICs. No change.
>
>> Are you just installing from PXE and then running local or is every boot PXE?
>
> Every boot is via PXE, not just the installation.  See
>
>    http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/FreeBSD-diskless.html
>
> ...
>
>> I'd try to reflash the NIC
>
> We did. Anyway, would both NICs be defective? So we are looking for a way to instruct the FreeBSD kernel to use the 10GBE port rather than the port the system booted from.
>
> Daniel Feenberg

Ahhh... It's a netboot effectively.

The FreeBSD kernel isn't involved in PXE.  PXE requests and downloads the load images/configs.  The load images/configs then take over completely. PXE if out of the picture at that 
point. PXE, based on the NIC MAC address/UUID IS capable offering differing loads/configs.

Were you to watch the boot process with, say wireshark, you can see PXE request and re-try PXE configs, starting with the most specific config, the UUID, then subsets and finally 
going to a generic default to find the load/configs