On 04.04.2012 [17:39:24 -0500], James Cammarata wrote: > >> Does this still happen if you use the cobbler trigger to set > >> netboot-enabled to false? Not sure if that's a valid option for > >> whatever OS you're building or not but take a look at the > >> kickstart_done snippet. > > > > I'm not sure I understand entirely. I have 'pxe_just_once' set to 1 in > > my /etc/cobbler/settings, and that does nicely unset the netboot enabled > > flag for the systems that are net-installed. However, the problem I saw > > (and I can try and test without my changes to re-confirm this) is that > > the DHCP server is still configured to respond over the network when > > this flag is changed (by default), so the netbooting machine gets a DHCP > > response, but the netboot environment no longer exists, and we fail. But > > system firmware is so dumb in this instnace that it just cycles there, > > rather than failing over ... > > Interesting, what it should be doing is creating a PXE file but with > the only option being to boot from local disk. Maybe that doesn't work > for ppc64 systems?
Yeah, I don't think that's how netbooting works in general. Basically, once we have a netboot configuration (either hard-coded in the SMS menus or discovered via DHCP), we tftpboot yaboot, and then yaboot goes and looks for a yaboot.conf (or per-MAC address configuration, if present). yaboot itself is what does the kernel/initrd netloading. So i think what happens is DHCP says 'hey go load yaboot', and we perhaps load yaboot (as it's globally present in /var/lib/tftpboot) but then there is no corresponding per-MAC address configuration, so we fail to find a kernel to load (installer or otherwise). And since there is no yaboot.conf found, we don't have an easy way to fallback to the disk (which has its own yaboot, etc.) > >> Forcing a full sync every time a system changes the netboot-enabled > >> flag is probably not a good solution though, as this is a very > >> time-consuming operation for cobbler installations with a large number > >> of distros/systems/profiles. Unfortunately, ISC's dhcpd doesn't have a > >> great CLI command option so doing dynamic updates doesn't seem to > >> work, unless someone can point me to some good docs on the subject. > >> Everything I've found says the CLI management tool is spotty at best. > > > > Would it be possible to perhaps add a 'dhcpsync()' variant of sync that > > only ensured the DHCP configuration was updated (with the above chnage > > to ensure netboot disabled servers weren't listed)? > > > > If not, I'm happy to carry the above chagne locally. > > I would accept a patch for that, I could see it being useful to > regenerate the dhcp config without doing a full sync. Sounds good, I'll start working on the changes. Do you prefer all changes to come as pull requests? Thanks, Nish -- Nishanth Aravamudan <n...@us.ibm.com> IBM Linux Technology Center _______________________________________________ cobbler-devel mailing list cobbler-devel@lists.fedorahosted.org https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler-devel
