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. Turn off your DHCP server.
  2. Run mix snoop -s <prefix> on your testing machine.
  3. Boot up your target PXE system.

    • You should see your PXE request fly by, gather the saved DHCP request.
  4. Turn off snoop and restart your DHCP server (usually that is dnsmasq or ihc-dhcp-server).
  5. From a place where you can see the same server, use mix dhcp <file> to send the packet you collected 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.