tftp pxegrub does not work properly

[faqtor faqtor150]

Hi all,

did anybody have experienced the same ever?
I compiled grub with e1000 networking support and tried to use it to boot my 
maschine directly from the switch. The switch itself have a dhcp server and 
tftp server running.

When I power on the maschine, the dhcp server on the switch give the right 
ip via DHCP to the NIC and the pxegrub transfer starts without one package 
lost or any retry.

Then, when the pxegrub is loaded successfully, the application asks for a 
new IP via BOOTP. The switch answers the package immediately and send a 
DHCPOFFER back to pxegrub. PXEGRUB itself does not take care of this offer 
and asks again and again and again... Sometimes its done in half of a second 
(which is fine) and other times it take more than a minute (whats worse) and 
in very rare situations it just never accept the offer. And it is the same 
behavior with every DHCP server I use. Even when I do it with other DHCP and 
tftp servers on Linux or Windows its ever the same. And its definitely not 
the switch or the NIC. Everything is OK with the hardware.

So, when it successfully got the IP, pxegrub start to download the 
configfile (which is given via option 150). For this nearly 550 byte it 
needs at least 2 retries. Remember first time when we boot we need not a 
single retry! When it executes the loaded configfile then, you get your menu 
finally. But after this the loading of the kernel will never be successful 
again. It is just retrying 4 times per package and then start again with the 
same package.

I already have entered a lot of debugging messages and I am now at the end 
of my knowledge. I have no glue how to move forward.

my configure command would always be:
./configure --enable-diskless --enable-e1000 --enable-pci-direct 
--disable-auto-linux-mem-opt  --disable-ext2fs --disable-fat --disable-ffs 
--disable-ufs2 --disable-minix --disable-reiserfs --disable-vstafs 
--disable-jfs --disable-xfs --disable-iso9660 --disable-hercules 
--disable-serial

I can not use --disable-packet-retransmission then I get errors on compiling 
with the pci module.

my version is 0.97 with the grub-0.97-nic_update-2.patch

The reason to use GRUB are the menu, (so I could boot a CD as well, or other 
OS-es) and, that I do not need to have an tftp server supporting the tsize 
option as I would need it using pxelinux for instance.

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