[cobbler] Doing PXE without control over the DHCP server

[Niels Basjes]

Hi,

A long time ago I asked and later documented on Stack Overflow how to do
PXE if you do not have control over the central DHCP server.
http://serverfault.com/questions/53116/howto-setup-cobbler-with-pxe-if-yo...

A few months ago I got an email from someone stating he couldn't get the
above to work.  He also stated

    I sent an email about this issue to the cobbler mailing list and even
    Michael Dehaan, the cobbler creator, did not know about this
    possibility, so I think your input would be useful to many people.

So that is the purpose of this mail; It may be useful to you guys.

Turns out that I had done some fixing and changing of my own cobbler (long
time ago) that I had forgotten about.
So a few days ago I provided the crucial fix to the mainline
cobbler<https://github.com/cobbler/cobbler/pull/157> which
has now become part of the trunk.
https://github.com/cobbler/cobbler/pull/157
I also created some additional supporting
documentation<http://howto.basjes.nl/linux/doing-pxe-without-dhcp-control>
to
explain in broad terms how to use this.
http://howto.basjes.nl/linux/doing-pxe-without-dhcp-control

The mentioned fix also has another usecase which I have deployed several
times.
I can now define a MAC address, IP address, hostname combination in cobbler
and instruct it to install CentOS with a kickstart file that also installs
puppet.
Because with this fix the client gets a fixed hostname I can use puppet to
cleanly define what software needs to be installed.

In addition I can choose to omit the IP address and has a situation where
the client gets a fixed hostname in an environment where I leave the IP
addresses dynamic.
This last usecase is something I see as a viable scenario for deploying
roaming Linux desktops/laptops and maintaining control over the installed
software using a tool like puppet.

-- 
Met vriendelijke groeten,

Niels Basjes