Retaining information between DHCP requests

Simon Hobson dhcp1 at thehobsons.co.uk
Thu Oct 9 07:22:24 UTC 2014


CLOSE Dave <Dave.Close at us.thalesgroup.com> wrote:

> The DISCOVER and REQUEST messages in the first exchange include a unique 
> vendor-class-identifier starting with "anaconda". I can and do detect 
> that string and provide the special nameserver response needed. But the 
> subsequent REQUESTs do not include that string and dhcpd then provides 
> the normal operation response. That confuses kickstart and the 
> installation fails.

The first suggestion is to look at why Kickstart isn't behaving properly - raise it as a bug report and see what happens.

Otherwise there are a few things I can think of.

1) Do you actually *have* to use a static address ?
2) Does the address used by kickstart have to be in the same range as that used by the machine once it's running ?
3) Would reserved leases help ?
4) Are you providing any "per host" options ?

One thought is to use a separate pool for Kickstart. Use a class to have Kickstart use this pool and the booted machine to use the main pool. You can then apply options to the pools.
If you *must* have fixed addresses, then would reserved addresses do ? Create a "stub" lease and add the "reserved" statement to it. That lease will then only be used for the specific client.
Without the reserved statement, the addresses will still be effectively static if your set of machines is smaller than the pool size - because the server will try and issue the same address to each client even if it was long expired.



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