I’m probably not the only one owning a Linksys Router with DD-WRT firmware on it. It took me (not long) but for sure a little while to get the nasty dhcp option 66 and 67 in there to PXE boot my VM’s with Provisioning Services as TFTP server. This here is just a little article how I configured it.

So the challenge is that when you PXE boot your VM’s you will see that your router is responding to it, and not your PVS server. You will definitely have to edit your router config to get it to work. What you need to know is that DD-WRT has 2 different DHCP servers on board: DHCPd and DNSMasq. Default I think DNSMasq is selected (and the better one). So here’s how to configure:

Method 1 – Use DHCPd:

On the Setup\Basic Setup page of DD-WRT disable Use DNSMasq for DHCP (DHCP Authoritive will be disabled as well)
On the Services\Services page in the Additional DHCPd Options field add the following options:

• dhcp-option=66,”192.168.x.y”
• dhcp-option=67,”ARDBP32.BIN”

Note from author: When I used this setup name resolution became really slow (really, really slow) but I’m still not sure if it had anything to do with disabling DNSMasq.

Method 2 – Use DNSMasq (recommended):

On the Setup\Basic Setup page of DD-WRT make sure Use DNSMasq for DHCP is enabled (DHCP Authoritive can be enabled as well)
On the Services\Services page make sure DNSMasq is enabled and enter the following code in the Additional DNSMasq Options:

• dhcp-boot=ARDBP32.BIN,pvs1,192.168.x.y

In this case is pvs1 the hostname of your pvs server. So no option 66 and 67 necessary.

That’s really all there is to it. Have fun playing with PVS.