[et-mgmt-tools] cobbler-1.0.1-2 - build problem using koan

[Tom Brown]

> Please explain how your home brew system talks to booting systems.  
> When your provisioned systems boot, how do they communicate with the 
> server hosting the kickstart files?
> As I understand it, at network boot time, they need to have IP 
> addresses, netmasks assigned to them.  PXE starts by the NIC(s) 
> broadcasting its MAC address.  Some daemon on the LAN segment 
> (typically dhcp) will respond to the broadcast by assigning the NIC an 
> IP address and subnet mask.
>
> Unless you have an ability to assign IPs/netmasks to NICs through BIOS 
> (which I've never seen and which would be a pain to do for a 'lot' of 
> servers) or have some other mechanism (i.e. other than DHCP) which 
> assigns IPs/netmasks by responding to MAC broadcasts, you will have to 
> use DHCP somewhere during a network install.
>

i will try and explain as best i can as i did not write the system - but 
basically what i believes happens is that a minimal boot kernel boots 
that is generated on the client machines before a reboot is issued. 
Within this boot kernel is the network info that allows the box to have 
network info before it then downloads its kickstart file etc. This is 
how i thought koan worked as i can rebuild machines using a different 
cobbler server and in a different network that the cobbler server knows 
nothing about, i mean it knows nothing about these other networks from a 
DHCP point of view.

I can of course see why my goal will not work on a bare metal system but 
i thought that on a system that has a running OS koan could be used to 
rebuild it to the profile as per assigned by the cobbler server. When 
rebuilds occur using koan i did not think DHCP or PXE came into it.

thanks