Please explain how your home brew system talks to booting systems.
When your provisioned systems boot, how do they communicate with the
server hosting the kickstart files?
As I understand it, at network boot time, they need to have IP
addresses, netmasks assigned to them. PXE starts by the NIC(s)
broadcasting its MAC address. Some daemon on the LAN segment
(typically dhcp) will respond to the broadcast by assigning the NIC an
IP address and subnet mask.
Unless you have an ability to assign IPs/netmasks to NICs through BIOS
(which I've never seen and which would be a pain to do for a 'lot' of
servers) or have some other mechanism (i.e. other than DHCP) which
assigns IPs/netmasks by responding to MAC broadcasts, you will have to
use DHCP somewhere during a network install.
i will try and explain as best i can as i did not write the system - but
basically what i believes happens is that a minimal boot kernel boots
that is generated on the client machines before a reboot is issued.
Within this boot kernel is the network info that allows the box to have
network info before it then downloads its kickstart file etc. This is
how i thought koan worked as i can rebuild machines using a different
cobbler server and in a different network that the cobbler server knows
nothing about, i mean it knows nothing about these other networks from a
DHCP point of view.
I can of course see why my goal will not work on a bare metal system but
i thought that on a system that has a running OS koan could be used to
rebuild it to the profile as per assigned by the cobbler server. When
rebuilds occur using koan i did not think DHCP or PXE came into it.
thanks
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