giving bootp request ONLY once

Simon Hobson dhcp at thehobsons.co.uk
Wed Jun 14 13:01:54 UTC 2006


Yayati Singh wrote:

>>Do you really mean bootp, or dhcp ?
>>What are you trying to achieve ?

>I meant bootp,
>Since every time the machine would boot it would get a bootp directive and
>start re-installing the OS ( i use pxe ). So i have to sit down on the
>machine console every time it reboots for the first time and do the
>following:
>#1 change the boot order in the BIOS, to boot from the hardisk.
>or
>#2  Change the dhcp.conf and comment the particular host, restart dhcpd.
>i want to avoid all these and do an un-attended installation of OS when
>needed, without sitting on the console to do some manual intervention in
>preventing the machine going in a reboot loop.
>
>The other application is we have many appliances, which we kickstart from
>time to time, but we need not always reboot the appliances with kickstarting
>in mind, so on post install on the first reboot we have to manually disable
>PXE boot on the appliances. This whole process gets painfull.  We wanted to
>see if we can control bootp from dhcpd itself. Hence controlling OS
>installations when ever needed.

First off, it would help if you put more care into separating your 
reply from the text you quote !

How about pxe booting into a smaller image that contains (in effect) 
a boot manager ?

Your boot manager could load itself, interact with a central server 
to find out what you want it to do, then go off and boot whatever 
image you want. With this method, you could have a server where you 
can flag a machine as requiring a new Windows install, the client 
will boot, detect this and reinstall Windows. As the client boots, as 
well as telling the client to reinstall Windows, the server can reset 
the flag so that when the client reboots, it will just do a normal 
boot into Windows.

It's an area I've never dealt with, but I do know that there are boot 
managers designed to allow selection of the OS to boot when the PC 
boots via PXE.

I suspect that you'd find this easier and cleaner than trying to 
fudge something via dhcp.

Simon


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