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