Comments on tech & sp: ISC dhcpd and IP assignments from a pool to specif...

@Steve: Actually we are doing pretty much the same...

2011-01-02T19:23:55.539+01:00

@Steve: Actually we are doing pretty much the same thing. We are also using PXE configuration files with a MAC based file name. What I described above is just an additional security measure so we are not running a dhcpd in a public network that dishes out IP configurations to everyone.

@Alex: with that vanilla config other machines will get IP configurations as well, which is not what we wanted.

My solution for the reboot issue is running my own implementation of faimond, which automagically removes the subclass I described above once FAI has finished its work. This way I can ensure not to end up in an install cycle (reboot, PXE boot, install, reboot, PXE boot, ...).

from a vanilla dhcpd.conf in debian: #host passac...

2011-01-02T05:50:18.186+01:00

from a vanilla dhcpd.conf in debian:

#host passacaglia {
# hardware ethernet 0:0:c0:5d:bd:95;
# filename "vmunix.passacaglia";
# server-name "toccata.fugue.com";
#}

The problem of such installations, is that upon reboot you need to make sure that server will not do pxe boot again. :-)

The only ways i found for this is that you setting PXE boot as a
second boot option after the boot from hard drive. But this way will not work if you do not have clean disks. For this case the only solution is to start dhcp server, start server, make sure that server got syslinux, stop dhcp. Or just clear bootrecords on the hard drive before installation, which is not the best option if you need to unscrew the box and hard drive before this.

Interestingly at the place I work we do off...

2011-01-02T01:17:24.396+01:00

Interestingly at the place I work we do offer PXE booting for all systems. (It is very useful in the case of broken hardware, or compromised system, to have a network booting environment which allows a system to be reimaged/examined.)

In our case we use a clever hack - We mount a FUSE filesystem on the TFTP root directory such that we can have a per-machine configuration file, based upon MAC address.

This allows me to powercycle/reboot a machine and it will automatically boot locally, or boot into a specific environment when the file 01-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx is read by the pxelinux.0 file, after being served via tftpd.

(The files in the TFTP root are generated from a simple template based upon what is essentially a CSV file of "MAC, IP, System-to-boot".)