[Infrastructures] Installation using PXEboot but not booting system with DHCP

[David A. Ulevitch]

On Jun 27, 2005, at 3:35 PM, Michael T. Halligan wrote:

> David,
>
> What I do is keep Hard Disk/Scsi as #1, PXE as number two. When I  
> want to reboot and force a pxeboot, I'll delete the MBR
> as so :
>
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda (or whatever your MBR location is),  
> bs=1024 count=1

Interesting...

>
> Now say you're using Linux, and redhat to do a Kickstart, or SuSE  
> with AutoYAST. A nice thing you could do
> is install from the beginning with a second kernel that does a  
> kickstart/autoyast/place your favorite installation system here as  
> a boot option.. Then
> you could have a script that changes the kernel boot order, and  
> runs that installation on boot when you want to re-install.

Awesome...  This would tie into our debian auto-installation systems  
perfectly.  This doesn't cover the case when someone _really_ hoses a  
system so much that you can't overwrite the MBR but those are edge  
cases and when that happens, it's not a big deal to manually change  
the bios through the conserver or even get a KVM hooked to it if needed.

Thanks,
David Ulevitch



> David A. Ulevitch wrote:
>
>
>> Infrastructure Folks,
>>
>> Here's a question I've had for a while that I was reminded of by  
>> the  DHCP question posed to the list.
>>
>> I PXEBoot for installation but then I want to boot from the hard  
>> disk  afterwards.
>>
>> In a BIOS I can set a boot order of "1: Hard Disk, 2: PXE" but  
>> that  only works when the hard disk is empty and has no MBR  
>> setup.  As soon  as installation completes and it reboots, the  
>> PXEboot process starts  up all over again.
>>
>> I have a system that modifies the dhcpd.conf to take a mac  
>> address  out of the PXEboot group but that seems like a pain and  
>> perhaps the  wrong way about it.
>>
>> How do people install with PXEboot but then boot off the hard  
>> drive  in subsequent reboots.  Different network?  Special BIOS  
>> tricks?
>>
>> A related question, how do you then PXEboot in the future if you  
>> want  to reinstall a box that has an already working disk (but a  
>> programmer  hosed, for example)?
>>
>> Hopefully this is on-topic for this list.  I know it's certainly  
>> a  topic list members have experience with...
>>
>> Thanks,
>> David Ulevitch
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Infrastructures mailing list
>> Infrastructures@mailman.terraluna.org
>> http://mailman.terraluna.org/mailman/listinfo/infrastructures
>>
>
>
>
> -- 
> -------------------
> BitPusher, LLC
> http://www.bitpusher.com/
> 1.888.9PUSHER
> (415) 724.7998 - Mobile
>
>
>
> !DSPAM:42c07f24173521254035793!
>
>