that depends on the BIOS of your system; it's not an issue that CentOS
can (easily) deal with. some Dell servers have a utility that you can
use to change BIOS settings from within the OS, but i can't speak to how
well it works.
here's how i solved a related problem when setting up a lab of machines
that would be PXE-booting to reinstall themselves without an admin at
the console:
1) in the BIOS, set the boot order to PXE,HD (you can put CD/floppy/USB
before HD if you want, but PXE must be first)
2) set up your TFTP server such that the default boot target boots from
the system's hard drive (use the "LOCALBOOT" option as described here:
http://syslinux.zytor.com/faq.php)
3) created another PXELINUX configuration that performs a network boot
and give it a name that corresponds to either the machine's MAC address
or the machine's IP address (as described here:
http://syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php#config)
4) if you're using the PXE boot to kickstart the machine, add a line to
the %post section of your ks.cfg that will ssh to the TFTP server and
move aside the PXELINUX config file with the machine's MAC/IP address
(you can make this process as simple or complicated as you need)
if you follow these steps, then the machine will PXE-boot when the
special config file is in place, kickstart itself, and then move the
special config file aside; when it next boots, the TFTP server won't
find the special config file, so it'll use the default config file,
which tells the machine to boot from the local hard drive.
does this make sense?
-steve
p.s. there are other ways of having the machine "phone home" to the tftp
server besides using ssh; one of my colleagues did it with a little php
script. alternately, you could have a script running on the TFTP server
that watches the logfile for evidence of successful PXE boots and uses
that information to move aside the special config file.
thanks - these are Dells yes so i'll give this a shot
cheers
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