Hi,

I'm going in circles here and would appreciate any help.

I'm trying to kickstart a vmware client. This is my first attempt to use this kickstart server. This kickstart server is used company wide and was working fine last week. The DHCP and tftp service reside on the same host.

when I boot the client I obtain an IP but never go further. i get the error "PXE-E32: TFTP open timeout"

TFTP is running via xinetd and I have already restarted it.
chkconfig --list tftp
tftp on

netstat -an |grep 69
udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:69 0.0.0.0:*
unix 3 [ ] STREAM CONNECTED 6369

The client is a vmware host. I have tried the E1000 intel and the vmxnet virtual NICs, both failed.

I also do a netdump while its booting and never see any tftp traffic. I don't see any tftp related info in /var/log/messages either.

Suggestions?

I had a similar problem with a laptop not wanting to boot off of a TFTP image properly. I am using clonezilla, and after getting a copy of the boot CD they have, the problem went away. I don't know if that will fix your problem, but I would get a boot CD and see what happens. It could be there is something odd with your ethernet card.

What is the networking for the VM like? Is it on the same subnet as the PXE server, or is it getting an IP from dhcp on the workstation that is on same subnet? If the VM is on the same machine as the PXE server, then try using the host-only networking for the VM.