DHCP Help Again

[Martin Siegert]

On Wed, Apr 10, 2002 at 04:25:17PM +0200, tegner at nada.kth.se wrote:
> Very helpful! Thanks!
> 
> But I'm still curious about how you make - automagically - the hardware ethernet
> line in dhcpd.conf initially. Say you have 100 machines. One way I would think
> of would be to use kickstart and:
> 
> Install the machines and boot them up in sequence and using the range statement
> in dhcpd.conf (so that the first machine gets 192.168.1.101, the second
> 192.168.1.102 ...)
> 
> Once all nodes are up use some script to extract the mac addresses for all the
> nodes and either modify dhcpd.conf - or - discard of dhcp completely and
> hardwire the ip-addresses to each node.
> 
> But I'm sure there are better ways to do this?

If you want to use static ip addresses anyway (as I do), why do you
use dhcp at all?

I use a kickstart file with something like

network --bootproto static --device eth3 --ip 172.17.254.1 --netmask 255.255.0.0 --gateway 172.17.0.1 --hostname ks1 --nameserver 172.17.0.1

and have on the master node a set of ip addresses reserved for kickstart
installations:

172.17.254.1		ks1
172.17.254.2		ks2
172.17.254.3		ks3
172.17.254.4		ks4
172.17.254.5		ks5

In the %post section of the kickstart file I then run a script that increases
a counter on the master node, returns that counter as the real ip address
of the new node, and updates the /etc/hosts file on all other nodes.

I have installed my cluster (96 nodes) that way all by myself without any
(big) problems ... maybe I just was too lazy to learn how to deal with dhcp.

Cheers,
Martin

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Martin Siegert
Academic Computing Services                        phone: (604) 291-4691
Simon Fraser University                            fax:   (604) 291-4242
Burnaby, British Columbia                          email: siegert at sfu.ca
Canada  V5A 1S6
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