Re: Kickstart http parameters

[Tony Nugent <tony linuxworks com au>]

On Tue Apr 01 2003 at 21:56, John wrote:

(G'day John!  How's things out west... lots of drought-breaking rain?)

> On Mon, 31 Mar 2003, Daniel Nilsson (GIS) wrote:

> > Is there a way to get the ethernet-adress of a client when its
> > requesting the ks.cfg-file from a http-server?
> >
> > I want to generate the ks.cfg with a cfg-script and the only
> > unique id on my hosts is ethernet-adress.
> 
> If you use cgi to generate the ks file, then you can use the arp command
> (/sbin/arp -n) to get the IP and MAC addresses of those hosts known to
> your kernel.

Just a small point here (and almost off-topic)... the /sbin/ip
utility can often (usually) be a far more useful (and powerful) tool
for doing things like that.  It would be very easy to grep and then
sed hardware addresses from the output of "/sbin/ip n".

  The /sbin/ip utility replaces (and obseletes) /sbin/route
  /sbin/arp and /sbin/ifconfig (and gives access to a huge amount of
  other networking functionality within the kernel, such as policy
  routing).

It would require some cleaver server-side magic (eg, using php) to
generate or supply kickstart config files based on client hardware
addresses (certainly not impossible to do:)

But in the end, wouldn't it be much easier to have a dhcpd server
allocate static IPs based on the HW address, then have the
host-specific ks.cfg file available based on IP rather than HW
addresses?  (This is the more traditional approach).

> This only works if the client is on the same subnet, and the request
> isn't being proxied.
> 
> If the client is far far away, then there is now way.

Cheers
Tony