Last night, I succeeded in installing
m0n0wall on a PCELinux-booted soekris.

This is a 4521 which I previously installed
by removing the CF.   I needed to use PXE
to prove the concept before buying a 4526,
which is very inexpensive, but has a soldered-in
CF memory.

This is my simple summary - or a how-to use a how-to...

I started with google something like
"how to use pxe to boot soekris pxelinux"
and I found this How-To:

"How to use PXE boot to bootstrap a net4501"
http://www.xs4all.nl/~dorus/linux/net4501/pxeboot.html


I had a Red Hat Linux (?9.0? with working DHCP server.
I configured DHCP accoring to the above How-To.
I configured tftpd.   I tested tftpd from the local host,
and from another host on the network.

I found remote tftp attempts failed.   Since it is a private
network, I merely ran "iptables -F" to open the F/w completely.
That's dangerous, Your mileage may vary, you were warned.


I found after following those instructions that the 4521
was booting the kernel, then it was failing to get its libraries...
I got a bunch of tftp errors.  It looked like this:
    Loading packages via tftp from console=ttyS0,19200.
    tftp> usage: get host:file host:file ... file, or
          get file file ... file if connected
and then more tftp errors.

I surmised that the line in /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default
   append console=ttyS0,19200
was causing the problem.  I cut that line,
tacked it onto the end of the line beginning "default net4501/linux"

and replaced the original append line with "append 10.248.126.199"
so the whole file looks like:

serial 0 19200
timeout 0
append 10.248.126.199
default net4501/linux ip=10.248.126.23:::255.255.255.0:net4501:eth0 rw
initrd=net4501/initrd.lrp init=/linuxrc root=/dev/ram0
boot=/tftpboot/10.248.126.199
LRP=root,etc,local,modules,bzip2,fs,fdisk,syslinux,smbmount,wget
console=ttyS0,19200


The system booted, I did a cd /tmp
wget 10.248.126.199/b7.img
dd etc. as per the instructions.

I still don't know why what worked for others did not
work on my system, but I wanted to publish this now.
I will try to make a FAQ on this - and/or have these
notes included on the original how-to that I referenced.

Seth

PS I will also write some notes on how I used ckermit
to do this work.   It was easiest to fall back to that
oldie but goodie, probably the most powerful term program around...