Installed R5.5 on my test box, which I am using as a FE/BE, that was easy/straight forward. Then I ran the:

knoppmyth_diskless_frontend.bash

shell script as root without issues. After the script ran, my diskless client booted and ran without issue, could watch video/live TV without issue. So far so good. Then I rebooted the test box, after the reboot the test box was fine, but the diskless client was DOA. Attempting to boot the client box off the rebooted FE/BE box gets an IP number, then gives the following errors:

PXE-E32: TFTP open timeout
PXE-E32: TFTP open timeout
PXE-E32: TFTP open timeout
PXE-M0F: Exiting NVIDIA Boot Agent

So, questions,

How do I make sure the TFTP server comes up after a reboot?
What other services have to come up after a reboot, and how do I make sure they do come up?

Thanks.

The tftp server is run by the inetd service. knoppmyth_diskless_frontend.bash inserts a line in /etc/inetd.conf for the tftp service. On my 5.5 box, this line looks like this:

tftp dgram udp wait root /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/in.tftpd -s /tftpboot

You can test the tftp server by installing the tftp client:

apt-get update
apt-get install tftp
(Debian is not the distro I'm most familiar with, so please correct these commands if I'm wrong )

You can then test your tftp server anytime by getting a file from /tftpboot. For example, this gets pxelinux.0 and then does a diff to make sure the transferred file is the same as the original:

root@sideshowmel:~# tftp 127.0.0.1
tftp> get pxelinux.0
Received 13628 bytes in 0.0 seconds
tftp> q
root@sideshowmel:~# diff pxelinux.0 /tftpboot/pxelinux.0
root@sideshowmel:~#

Also to do network boot, your dhcp server must be running. You should see an entry for it in /etc/rc5.d/S*dhcp3-server.

Another thing that may be happening is that if you have a DHCP server for your home network, it may also be responding to your diskless client's initial DHCP requests and your client may be choosing its lease offering instead, but not every time. For testing purposes, disable your home network's DHCP server. I use pfSense and I'm able to tell it to ignore DHCP requests from certain MAC addresses by adding a static MAC mapping with an empty IP address. When I was still using Sveasoft, I recall that you could do the same with their DHCP server.

Hope this helps.