Good day Jon, In regards to a gPXE 'waitfor <ip> <port> <timeout>' command, I have a few thoughts:
If gPXE were to someday support IPv6 or some other network protocol, would this command be as applicable/relevant? It would seem that the <port> option implies that we have some way of knowing that the <port> is available. Would it make sense to tie <port> to something that gPXE knows how to use, such as a download protocol or SAN-boot protocol? Given that gPXE has a strong focus on small code size for ROM build targets, could 'waitfor' or other similar use cases be better implemented in a more generic fashion? If the check can be accomplished by repeated download attempts in a loop, the scripting discussion in the gPXE developers' mailing-list could potentially come to fruition and accomplish this same behaviour in a more programmatically generic way, with 'if' and loops, for example. As it stands, there are patches not yet committed to the gPXE official code-base which can accomplish the behaviour of the suggested 'waitfor' command, if the assumption is that a download trial is roughly the same as testing for <port>. #!gpxe clear script_errors dhcp net0 : test_download chain http://ip:8080/some_boot_file sleep 10 goto test_download In the above, 'chain' should not return, but if it does, we wait ten seconds and retry. The above does not work in current gPXE, but does work with some of the patches under discussion. - Shao Miller _______________________________________________ gPXE mailing list [email protected] http://etherboot.org/mailman/listinfo/gpxe
