Network broken by dhclient on network boot

[Michal Suchanek <hramrach@centrum.cz>]

Hello

This may sound odd but it's an issue I am facing most of the time
since I started with netboot images.

The boot process is as follows:

 - the PXE bios gets an IP address and downloads pxelinux from the server
 - pxelinux downloads the kernel and initrd from the server
 - pxelinux throws away the network settings and executes linux
 - linux loads initrd which again gets an IP address using ipconfig,
mounts the ntwork filesystem and starts init
 - init loads its scripts in order, including the networking script
that starts dhclient

Ideally, dhclient just obtains the same IP address and is done with it.

However, this is not what it does. It shuts down the network, runs its
enter hooks (which I remove in my debbian-live chroot hook) and then
configures the network again.

Still there is a problem I noticed recently: when the server that
provides the root filesystem is on a different subnet dhclient fails
to re-add the default route and the boot fails.

I will try to disable the networking script I guess (which is not
exactly right because then you do not get lease renewal).

If you have any other ideas how this could be resolved I would like to
hear them.

Thanks

Michal