I'm senior devops engineer with a deployment system to ship a couple thousand linux machines a week. I'm using vmware fusion 7 pro to do this, and I'm having a little trouble with pxe booting.
I ran into this little issue, so I thought i'd do a quick writeup to maybe save someone 15 mins. If someone knows a better way, I'd love to hear it.
I'm playing with PXE booting some containers. I want VMware Fusion to handle DHCP, and I want the VM's to be Nat'ed with my Mac for outside access, thus I need to use vmnet8 by default. I also have several virtual machines that should have static reservations to mimic the production network this system will reside on. So, I edit /Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/dhcpd.conf
I need to add two simple lines to the subnet declaration for tftp:
next-server 192.168.87.20;
filename "pxelinux.0";
The problem is the subnet declaration (line 26 of the stock file) is in the forbidden zone:
###### VMNET DHCP Configuration. Start of "DO NOT MODIFY SECTION" #####
If you change stuff in the forbidden zone then restart vmware fusion, or restart its networking, it rudely replaces the whole dhcpd.conf file with an auto-generated one. It does rotate the existing one to a backup, but only one rotation (3 would be less rude, so would a prompt and a log entry).