So the DHCP client does a DISCOVER, and the DHCP and PXE servers both reply with independent OFFERs, and the client somehow merges them together? <VERY CONFUSED>
Can you share a .pcap of where this is happening?
...ah, never mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preboot_Execution_Environment#Integration
It sounds like you're talking about this "proxyDHCP" thing, and "the client somehow merges them together" is right. YUK.
That's exactly right, and it's actually really good. Your DHCP server can just focus on assigning addresses, and your PXE server(s) focus on looking things up in databases and assigning the right boot image etc. I can see why you'd be a bit "yuck" about it on a small scale though. I'm working on a project for doing streaming restores of Windows servers (PXE boot and the restore starts but you can use the server while you're restoring it), and actually wrote a tiny PXE server for it, so I know what I'm talking about here, I just wanted the same PXE setup for net booting my Linux servers and didn't know what tools to use. Dnsmasq is probably overkill, but does the job so I'll go with using that. Thanks to those who suggested that. Thanks James