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

[Michael T. Halligan]

David,

Yeah.. Both methods work well.. I've always just been in the habit of 
buying enough console ports for every server, and being able to hit F12 
(or whatever) to
force a PXEboot when things really got bad.  Jordan's localhost 0 boot 
option is pretty cool.

I've thought about just always network booting servers, to get their 
kernel, then use local disks for data storage, that way you could keep 
things that much more
consistent (known state: always network boot).. What would be kind of 
cool would be to set your servers up this way, so that they first look 
at local disks for libraries/binaries,
and if those aren't available, to then remount everything you need over 
nfs or something.



David A. Ulevitch wrote:

> 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!
>>
>>
>


-- 
-------------------
BitPusher, LLC
http://www.bitpusher.com/
1.888.9PUSHER
(415) 724.7998 - Mobile