begin Tuesday 17 February 2004 19:07, Donald Teed quote:
I tried udpcast a few days ago and it worked well.
The full duplex
option to udp-sender was important to making it stable in my test.
I have a couple of questions...
1. (not exactly a udpcast question, but related...)
How can I set up DHCP/TFTP so that it doesn't require a
specific MAC address to direct a machine to the pxeboot image?
Emhh, just don't specify one?
I.e. put the vendor-encapsulated-options and filename options directly
on the root of your dhcpd.conf (i.e. not in a host { } section).
2. How can I provide the etherboot/PXE client machine
with the
menu file for udp-receiver?
I suppose by "menu file" you mean the "preconfiguration" file that
supplies the answers to the menu? (udpcfg.txt)?
For Etherboot, this needs to be integrated into the image (can be done
easily using cast-o-matic:
http://udpcast.linux.lu/cast-o-matic). The
"stage 2" screen in cast-o-matic allows you to pre-configure the
answers to the menu questions
For PXE, a limited number of items may be supplied on the kernel
command line (stored in the isolinux.cfg/default file on the tftp
server).
For more items, you need to put the udpcfg file into initrd (can be
done using cast-o-matic as well.
Alternatively, you can run makeImage locally, and use the options
described in
http://udpcast.linux.lu/mkimagedoc.html Of interest is
the -C option, which allows you to supply an udpcfg.txt file to be
included into the image.
3. Can the DHCP/TFTP server be different than the
box
running udp-sender? (Were the same in my test).
Yes. And in general they are. The sender is typically one of your
Windows machines that you want to clone, whereas the DHCP/TFTP server
is your Linux server. Btw, you can even put DHCP and TFTP on different
machines from each other. In that case, you use the next-server
setting in your DHCP config to point to your TFTP server.
I'm investigating how this can be used to image
4000 laptops
for a University, and in this case a bootable floppy or
CDROM is too cumbersome.
--Donald Teed
Regards,
Alain