Dave Miner wrote: > > Anyway, that's the history as best I remember. Sarah is in the early > stages of investigating what we'll do for automated installs in > Caiman. I'm sure she'll take the input into account and we'll of > course have quite open discussion of the proposal when formulated. > I'm not at all opposed to leveraging DHCP more fully (it was my > primary job for 5+ years, after all), but we as always have to be > pragmatic about where we put Sun's resources. > Thanks Dave!
I understand that resources are limited. And if it needed to be developed fresh, i can see where it'd be not worth the effort. I just didn't understand why, with the code there and functioning, it would need to be removed. Precedence is one reason. I don't know how big a job that would have been. Truely, I'm surprised that the SPARC side needs the dhcp in 'boot net - install dhcp' since I would think that if bootparams failed then DHCP could be tried next. Or the otherway around. While I understand that groups maintianing the DHCP servers may not be interested in adding or setting Solaris options, is there anything specific about the Sun vendor options that makes them incompatible with the other DHCP servers out there? And If Sarah's listening, I'm not stuck on DHCP: What I want is one place (NIS,NIS+,LDAP,DHCP,BOOTPARAMS or Something New,) to configure *ALL* the information for a network boot client. It should be the same for X86 and SPARC Preferrably, it would not be stored on the client itself (not in OBP on SPARC.) Though that could be another option. It shouldn't require me to repeat/update the same info for every client over and over again, like I showed with my DHCP macro's in the previous Post. or maybe something a little more sophisticated than the '*' wildcard in bootparams? It should scale, and leave a managable configuration even when 100's or 1000's of clients are configured. As a slightly related suggestion, I would like to see GRUB (especially if it is to appear on SPARC) expanded to be more like OBP. Possibly by storing what is in bootenv.rc now in menu.lst, or by referencing from there. the GRUB command line could be extended so that X86 could have something like 'boot net - install', or more importantly (if GRUB could read and use the contents of bootenv.rc) Solaris could actually make (the on disk GRUB - not PXEGRUB) honor a 'reboot -- 'net - install'' by automatically editing bootenv.rc before rebooting. -Kyle I'd even suggest that if GRUB is the prefferred way to pass this stuff to the kernel, then maybe GRUB should do the lookup of this info? This would support diskless clients also wouldn't it, since the rootfs could be configured this way?
