Understanding your PXE Booter

ExDhcp ships with a "snooping" tool that you can use to understand how your PXE bootstrap system works.

Here's how to use it.

  1. Run mix snoop on your testing machine.
  2. Boot up your target PXE system.

    • You should see your PXE request fly by.
  3. Turn off snoop and boot your DHCP server (usually that is dnsmasq or ihc-dhcp-server).
  4. Fire up iex and use ExDhcp.Packet.send/2 to send the packet and get the response back.

If you're writing a PXE boot system, you can use this system to write snapshot testing against your PXE server.

This workflow might change to be more efficient in the future; expect updates to hit over time.