strategies for changing boot order

[Ben Fitzgerald]

On Wed, Dec 22, 2004 at 11:41:21AM -0800, Dave Mack wrote:
> 
> Alan Horn wrote:
> 
> >Hi,
> >
> >I know that some of this is going to be fairly hardware specific, but what 
> >strategies do folks use for flipping boot order back to the primary 
> >ide/scsi system disk after doing a pxeboot install ?
> >
> >The way I do it right now is :
> >
> >o Initially enable pxeboot in the bios (if not set)
> >o Reboot box, go back into bios, set boot order to NIC pxeboot before HDD
> >o Unattended kickstart install
> >o Catch install after final reboot and jump into bios to reset boot 
> >  order.
> >
> >Obviously I'd like to do away with the last step to make it truly 
> >unattended after the setup phase.
> > 
> >
> I'm new to this list, but why worry about changing the BIOS back? You 
> can edit the defaults file in your pxelinux.cfg directory and set the 
> default boot to be the localdisk:

This was what I suggested in my mail, but it does add network overhead
and means that if you had 100 hosts relying on your pxe server and it
failed after a mass kernel patch (+ reboot)! I would rather rely on
less points of failure by booting BIOS -> hdd. The cost of this is a
one-off powerdown, and if you are keeping up with kernel revisions
this shouldn't be too long to wait?

Ben