[et-mgmt-tools] Troubleshooting

[Ole Ersoy]

Hello again,

I tried tcpdumping and looking at the traffic, but did not really see anything that looked like traffic from a machine on the local network.

I figured I'd try turning back on the routers DHCP server to see whether it would assign an address to the bare metal machine.  After doing this I still don't see it in the attached devices per the routers web admin tool.  Anyone know whether it's supposed to show up?  I'm just assuming that the first thing the bare metal machine should do is ask for an IP from the router (Or cobbler when that's being used).  

Actually do I need to do anything to the router to make sure that the bare metal machine can see cobbler's dhcp server?  There's a router setting "Use External DHCP Server" that I tried setting to the cobbler server's IP, but then I get this message:

Invalid External DHCP Server IP Address, and it must not be a LAN IP address.

So I just assumed that I should turn off the router's DCHP server, and the bare metal machine would then automatically get it from the cobbler server.

Am I going about this right?

Thanks,
- Ole





Peter Wright wrote:
> Ole Ersoy wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm trying to boot some bare metal over the network.  I followed all 
>> the steps in the tutorial:
>>
>> https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/HowToCobblerServer
>>
>> When I run cobbler check it just tells me this:
>>
>> [root at localhost cobbler]# cobbler check
>> The following potential problems were detected:
>> #0: since iptables may be running, ensure 69, 80, 25150, and 25151 are 
>> unblocked
>>
>> And I did make sure that these ports are open.  I then set the bare 
>> metal bios to boot from the LAN first, but I still get a "NO BOOT DISK 
>> FOUND ERROR...or something like that".
>>
>> Is there a way to simulate the request that boot client should be 
>> sending to cobbler?
>>
>>   
> 
> There are a couple things you can check - during your pxeboot phase do 
> you see a timeout or anything like that?  I find it helpful to do a 
> tcpdump on the cobbler box to see if infact the pxe and dhcp packets are 
> making it from the host to the server.
> 
> You can also tail /var/log/messages (by default) or /var/log/dhcpd (if 
> you setup a syslogd rule for dhcpd) to see if there are requests getting 
> through to the server.  One common mistake I make is that I forget to 
> add a subnet in my dhcp.template, and because of this my pxe requests 
> will fail (as dhcpd won't be configured to offer leases on that 
> subnet).  This will usually show up in your log file.
> 
> 
> -pete
> 
> 
> 
>