pxe booting lisa

more from the "making ancient hardware work department". Lisa is an old Compaq Deskpro, which faithfully served as my firewall machine for a few years. I want to install Debian 3.1 on that machine. Since it doesn't have a CD drive (and hooking one up resulted in a freaked out isolinux error), I try pxe booting this thing.
This system has an Intel EtherExpress with UNDI PXE-1.0, which dutifully gives me the wonderful error "No filename received". LIAR!

tcpdump -s 560 -vv not host 192.168.200.1

20:32:59.021883 IP (tos 0x0, ttl  20, id 2, offset 0, flags [none], length: 576) 0.0.0.0.bootpc > 255.255.255.255.bootps: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 00:d0:b7:19:b0:5e, length: 548, xid:0xba19b05e, secs:1792, flags: [Broadcast] (0x8000)
          Client Ethernet Address: 00:d0:b7:19:b0:5e
          Vendor-rfc1048:
            DHCP:DISCOVER
            PR:SM+DG+VC+VO+BF+T128+T129+T130+T131+T132+T133+T134+T135
            MSZ:1260
            GUID:0.165.28.236.157.227.180.211.17.162.226.146.14.228.177.124.15
            ARCH:0
            NDI:1.2.1
            VC:"PXEClient:Arch:00000:UNDI:002001"
20:32:59.022502 IP (tos 0x10, ttl  16, id 0, offset 0, flags [none], length: 328) sneezy.lostentry.org.bootps > 255.255.255.255.bootpc: [udp sum ok] BOOTP/DHCP, Reply, length: 300, xid:0xba19b05e, secs:1792, flags: [Broadcast] (0x8000)
          Your IP: 192.168.200.24
          Server IP: sneezy.lostentry.org
          Client Ethernet Address: 00:d0:b7:19:b0:5e
          file "/tftpboot/pxelinux.0"
          Vendor-rfc1048:
            DHCP:OFFER
            SID:sneezy.lostentry.org
            LT:600
            SM:255.255.255.0
            DG:chef.lostentry.org

There you have it. It's right there.

After banging my head at this for a little while, I try an option suggested in the pxelinux docs:

option vendor-class-identifier "PXEClient";

Sure enough, suddenly this thing is much more cooperative in the tcpdump. It picks up the IP address, and tries to connect to sneezy:4011. I need a pxe server daemon.

cd /usr/ports/net/pxe
make
make install

(I love the FreeBSD ports collection...)

A while later I'm still sitting here scratching my head. The pxe daemon seems to be working and sending config data back to lisa, but nothing appears to be happening. looks like as if it doesn't understand what the daemon is talking about, or it doesn't receive the response.

...

ok. I give up. Where are the floppy images...