I'm using cobbler on a VMware ESX server. For now, I'm creating VMs by hand using the vmware gui client. When I power them up they PXE boot, I type menu and choose a profile. Was hoping I could nail down the ip to the mac in %post I have been reluctant to manually dig into PM to find mac address and manually make a dhcp reservation. I'm looking into the VMperl API. VMware is calling it a legacy API. Don't know how much longer they will support it. I think it won't be too difficult to use VMperl to create scripts to make an appropriate dhcp reservations, or create a VM to order. Will let you know when I have something more concrete than plans. There's a new VI Perl SDK Beta. Haven't looked at the .exe I downloaded. Haven't found a Linux version. Have a vague recollection of a version issue with dnsmasq on my platform, CentOS5, but that could be my imagination, need to look at this again. Drew <div>On 7/30/07, Michael DeHaan <<a href="mailto:mdehaan@redhat.com">mdehaan@redhat.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> drew einhorn wrote: > Near the end of %post I issued a cobbler system add command > to bind the dynamically assigned ip to the mac address. DHCP reservations work exceedingly well. If you have manage_dhcp turned on in your /var/lib/cobbler/settings it will write your dhcp.conf for you. dnsmasq works even better as you can also pin the hostname from cobbler (dnsmasq does both DHCP and DNS, and cobbler can auto-configure it). Example: vi /var/lib/cobbler/settings manage_dhcp : 1 manage_dhcp_mode : dnsmasq # cobbler system add --name=foo --mac=AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF --ip=<a href="http://192.168.1.50">192.168.1.50</a> --hostname=" <a href="http://foo.example.com">foo.example.com</a>" This will ensure that when MAC address AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF boots it will automatically get the designed IP and (if using dnsmasq) the given hostname. if you leave manage_dhcp mode to "isc" (the default), you still get the variable $hostname accessible in your kickstart templates, so you can still set hostname/etc, but you will have other hoops to jump through to make it actually use it. Which is what I think you are alluding to below: > > After trying it and seeing that it was not working, I said: > > Duhhhh!!!! > > It needs to run on the cobbler host, not the box being provisioned. > > Is there an easy way to do this? > I can think of some that are not easy. Possibly including... (A) just-once-single-command-authorized-root-ssh (kind of scary) (B) CGI script (still scary) ??? Both of which pose interesting security issues. DHCP reservations are the way to go, IMHO, because they can be done entirely server side -- but I'm not a network administrator and you might have valid reasons for not doing things that way. > > -- > Drew Einhorn > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > et-mgmt-tools mailing list > <a href="mailto:et-mgmt-tools@redhat.com">et-mgmt-tools@redhat.com</a> > <a href="https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools">https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools </a> _______________________________________________ et-mgmt-tools mailing list <a href="mailto:et-mgmt-tools@redhat.com">et-mgmt-tools@redhat.com</a> <a href="https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools"> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools</a> </blockquote></div> -- Drew Einhorn