pxegrub

[David H. Lynch J.r]

I am using Grub 0.97 - and yes I know that is basically dead. But Grub2
2 does not have PXE or TFTP at the moment, and I am over committed on
other projects so I do not have time to try to add it myself.  

I am trying to use pxegrub to do tftp boots embedded software testing. I
have a Toshiba P25 Laptop that does PXE network booting, and has a
realtek 8139 NIC.  After much grief I have managed to get ISC DHCP and
atftp to successfully load pxegrub. But I never get the grub menu. 
First it appears Grub never picks up the DHCP option 150 with the menu
name - maybe I have something wron at the DHCP server end. Regardless I
have hardcoded the menu name I am after, my needs are really simple
here.  I just want to be able to pick between firing off a test kernel
TFTPed from another machine and booting whatever OS's I might have on
the machine. Anyway after  liberally splicing grub with  printf's, I
think this is a communications issue. Everything looks good down to
calls to the rtl8139 driver to send receive packets. I have not started
to capture packets, but dumping them inside pxegrub, it appears that the
IP address is going in as 0.0.0.0 not that of the tftp server.

Can anyone supply me with a clue ? I do not want to put more effort into
fixing pxegrub, than writing a new loader. Anything I do will be thow
away, but I may have to boot test kernels hunreds of times during
testing. It is much easier to just download the latest test directly
from my development machine, than to write it to a USB fob or ... I
would be perfectly happy to use somebodies working pxegrub for the rtl8139.

Help !