[Beowulf] Re: OT: PXE boot with no control over DHCP?

[Brian R Smith]

What does your dhcpd.conf file look like and what does your campus
network look like e.g. subnet and address range?  Feel free to obfuscate
any info you don't really want publicized.  

Also, what type of firewall rules did you use to punch your hole?  I
found that I actually had to shut off iptables for the 5 minutes it took
the nodes to PXE install.

-Brian

On Wed, 2005-09-21 at 15:11 -0700, David Mathog wrote:
> 
> > 1) Set up your own dhcp server and make sure you have all the mac
> > addresses for your hosts so that your server only offers addresses to
> > your clients and no one else.
> 
> Did that.  Also punched holes in the firewall for dhcp and tftp.
> 
> > 
> > 2) Make sure these hosts are on the same router or switch as your dhcp
> > server so your server manages to offer an address first, before the
> > campus dhcp that you don't manage.
> 
> Here's where things go south.  I don't see any evidence
> of the dhcp packets from the booting workstation reaching
> the server.  Even with the firewall turned off nothing
> shows up in the log files and the workstation client times out.
> I also tried booting knoppix on the machine, because
> it uses dhcp to find it's IP address, but the one it came up
> with was from the campus DHCP server and not my DHCP server.
> 
> Perhaps I have something wrong in the dhcpd.conf. Other than
> a typo this is fairly unlikely, it was modified from the working
> version that runs on the private subnet. Moreover the config
> eliminated the "Ignoring requests on eth0" message starting dhcp
> used to elicit, so the dhcpd does seem to have been ready to
> handle a request, if it ever saw one.  It seems that the
> campus network may really by blocking at the switch dhcp
> requests from reaching any but their servers. 
> 
> The workstations in question have an MBA which offers
> 4 network boot options: PXE, tcp/ip, netware, and RPL.  
> PXE seems to be out and I'd rather not start a netware
> transport on the main server just for  this purpose (assuming
> it's even possible.)  That leaves tcp/ip
> (presumably bootp?) and RPL (which I've never even heard of
> before).  Any thoughts on getting one of those two to work with DHCP
> blocked?  
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> David Mathog
> mathog at caltech.edu
> Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech
-- 
Brian R. Smith
HPC Systems Administrator
Research Computing Core Facility, USF
Phone: 1(813)974-1467   Cell: 1(813)230-3441
Address: 4202 E Fowler Ave LIB 608
         Tampa, FL 33620
Web: http://rccf.acomp.usf.edu