PXE Boot then Switch to Wi-Fi

Question

Is it possible to boot over PXE and then switch to the wi-fi network?

I have my wi-fi laptop connected via Ethernet to my network in order to boot an Ubuntu live CD image via PXE.

Now that I have booted up and my "ubuntu" desktop is up and running, I would like to switch to the wi-fi network so I can remove the network cable and walk around as usual until the next time I reboot.

I have connected to my wi-fi network, and ifconfig reports the expected IP address and settings for both eth0 and wlan0, with both on the same network.

At this point, I removed the Ethernet cable; however, it looks like I still can't get to the network in the Web browser, I can't ping any LAN devices, and typing "ls /" in the terminal window hangs until I reconnect the Ethernet cable.

I also tried this:

# route
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
default         router.network  0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 wlan0
192.168.1.0     *               255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 eth0
192.168.1.0     *               255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 wlan0

Is there something I still need to do, or is this not possible?

Thanks.

Answer 1

This is definately something you should be able to do. PXE booting only lickstarts the OS boot process - once the OS takes over it can do whatever it needs to.

It sounds to me that there is an issue relating to Ubuntu being confused by having 2 interfaces on the same network, and is preferring the ethernet interface. This is borne out by your route table output.

You may want to try disabling the ethernet interface in Ubuntu altogether which should fix the problem.