Test Boot from PXE server w/o DHCP by specifying PXE server to use?

Question

Is it possible to test a PXE client by directly expressing the pxe server to use?

I'd like to preferably specify this in grub or from a test VM with CentOS installed. This isn't meant as a production methodology by any means, I just would like to do some testing, but don't have access to our environments DHCP server.

Answer 1

Grub has an ifconfig command that lets you manually configure the network.

grub> ifconfig --address=<IP for this host> --mask=<network mask> --server=<TFTP server address>

Once you've set up the network interface, set the root disk to the network device (nd), point Grub to the kernel/initrd images, then boot it.

grub> root(nd)
grub> kernel /path/to/kernel/image
grub> initrd /path/to/initrd/image
grub> boot