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

[Adam Rosenwald]

Tom Brown wrote:
>
>> 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
I understand now.  I haven't used GRUB before to pass anaconda options 
when attempting to perform network installs.  Clearly we both now 
understand the problem and solution. :)

-A.
>
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