I've been playing round with a Mac or two, discovering how to do network
installs on them.
Since network-booting Macs is under-documented I've been doing (aside
from extended googling) much spying on network traffic.
I can now take a Mac, boot with "n" held down and get into yaboot (which
can't find its config file).
If I do it a little more manually, say by entering this command in OF:
boot enet:,\Mac\yaboot
then yaboot finds its config file.
However, while I would like an answer on that, what I have observed is
the user of vendor-class-identifier by the Macs and Anaconda to indicate
who's calling.
Configuring dhcpd3 to give different answers to different callers is
fairly simple:
class "Powerbook5"
{
match if substring (option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 26)
= "AAPLBSDPC/ppc/PowerBook5,1";
etc
If it's Anaconda calling, then
class "Anaconda"
{
match if substring (option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 9)
= "anaconda";
I note that Anaconda asks for lots of stuff I've not seen documented,
but that could be because I've not read the documents closely enough
recently. Things like log servers. LPR servers (does Anaconda want to
print stuff?), font servers... users should run tcpdump and analyse the
capture file with ethereal. It's very informative.
and I could give it different IP etc, and a filename.
Here's the suggestion:
How about having Anaconda misuse the file name to determine the
kickstart file to use. Possible values in dhcpd.conf might be:
filename "tftp://whatup.ks";; # Fetch with tftp
filename "http://www.example.con/cgu/kicker.ks";; get it via http,
possibly dynamically-generated.
and the usual suspects, of course.
If this were done, then installers could use unaltered standard media to
install using kickstart. One could boot from CD, Acanconda attempt to
configure all ethernet interfaces & use the first (or best) to install
from. If none provides a ks file, then do the usual manual install.
Note: Anaconda does need to watch out for pxelinux (and etherboot)
answers and ignore them.
--
Cheers
John
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