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List:       alice
Subject:    Re: [alice] use dhcp for network booting - two questions ...
From:       Marcel Ritter <Marcel.Ritter () rrze ! uni-erlangen ! de>
Date:       2001-05-02 7:07:52
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On Tue, 1 May 2001, Hans Fangohr wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> I want to use dhcp for assigning IPs to the newly installed system. I have
> two questions related to this process:
> 
> 1. When yast boots from floppy, and sends a bootp request over the
>   network, the dhcpserver reports that the MAC address of the client
>   (i.e. the machine yast is running on) is 00:00:00:00:00:01.
> 
>   (As you can image this is not the true MAC address of the ethernet card
>   in that machine...)
> 
>   Am I correct that this is made so on purpose, such that the
>   administrator can introduce a special entry in /etc/dhcpd.conf for
>   such machines that are just booting to be installed via the network?
> 
>   If this is so, then there should be a comment in alice's (or yasts?)
>   manual explaining this. If not, please let me know (in that case
>   something here is seriously wrong).
>   
>   (By the way, later on in the installation procedure the new system
>   actually reports the correct MAC address, which leads me to assuming the 
>   00:00:00:00:00:01 address is there on purpose.)
> 

Make sure you got the latest "bootdisk" image from SuSE ftp. The old one
(shipped with SuSE 7.1) was broken - resulting in the above behaviour.

Things should work fine afterwards.

> 2. I want to use alice to install the same operating system configuration
>   on a set of PC's. It should be precisely the same setup on each
>   computer, apart from the IP-adresses of the network cards (and the host
>   names). DHCP seems to be ideal for this. In fact, it is possibly too
>   good: I don't need _dynamic_ IPs.
> 
>   However, in an ideal world I would like to use DHCP only for the very
>   first time the system boots. After that I would like to store the IP of
>   each machine in its configuration files, such that each machine can boot
>   without a network connection to the DHCP server.
> 
>   I suppose this is a very special request, and there is no solution for
>   this within alice/yast?

Not really :-)
I wrote a add-on script for alice to do exactly that. It's not very
comfortable but it works :-)
If I get some more time (quite busy right now) I'll try to port it to the
newest available alice version - and I hope this will make it into the
next official release. If you want to get it right now - tell me.

> 
>   I guess I will have to write a script that reads the IP configuration
>   from the running system after installation, and then inserts the relevant
>   numbers into /etc/rc.config ?
> 
>   (The reason for my wish to do so, is that the installation procedure is
>   for compute-nodes in a beowolf cluster. If for some reason, the DHCP
>   server is down while a node boots, then the node wouldn't know it's
>   IP. It could then not be controlled via the network, and it would be
>   very annoying if one actually had to go physically to that (or all??)
>   machines in the cluster to activate networking/reboot etc.)
> 
> 
> Thanks for your time,
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Hans

Ciao,
   Marcel

> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------
> Hans Fangohr
> 
> High Performance Computing Group
> Department of Electronics and Computer Science
> Building 59, Level 3, Room 3237
> and
> Quantum and Functional Matter Group
> Department of Physics and Astronomy
> 
> University of Southampton
> Highfield
> Southampton
> SO17 1BJ
> Great Britain
> fangohr@soton.ac.uk
> ----------------------------------------------
> 
> 


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