On Dec 4, 2012, at 6:56 PM, Zack Perry wrote:
Hi,
I am in an environment where I cannot control DHCP, so I have gone to using Cobbler buildISO's to boot new installs.
That's a common and widespread misconception, regrettably :-(
You *never* need to have direct control of a DHCP server to be able to use PXE boot with cobbler.
The two DHCP servers that cobbler 2.2.3 (and later versions) work with OOTB: ISC DHCP and dnsmasq, both can act either as the authoritative DHCP for selected MAC addresses or simply just as proxies. Please check the relevant man page depending on your own preference.
In this environment, DHCP is neither ISC or dnsmasq, but Microsoft. Trying to get a DHCP reservation properly set up with the folks that run it has been a multi-day process that seldom gets done properly the first time. A dnsmasq proxy would be wonderful, but still requires cooperation.
cobbler hides some details, but my first hand experience has indicated that I still need to know *really* well the tools that it attempts to integrate to master cobbler.
You use image booting only if
- The OS (e.g. MS Windows) is not amenable for PXE booting via cobbler
(yet)
- You need fast start-up, e.g. your environment is like AWS EC2 or
a virtual server hosting provider's such as linode's
1a: PXE is impossible because the Microsoft folks have the network completely boogered up.
.
There might be some other usages at this moment I can't recall. But PXE booting is clean, and fast enough for most situations.
Today, for no reason I can locate, the process stops on a screen saying it cannot load the kickstart file. The given URL is valid and contains a proper, cobbler-generated kickstart.
Do a cobbler system getks --name=... Can you see the rendered kickstar file?
Answering this from home. I did not try that, but I did use a browser to check the URL that it claims is no-good and it comes up just fine. Also, I can get to the kickstart from the Cobbler web interface. I believe that is equivalent to the command line getks, yes ?
I checked firewalls, restarted apache, restarted cobblerd, did a "cobbler sync" and still the same roadblock.
These come later. Please do the above first. Always as the first step, often in conjunction with cobbler system dumpvars --name=... |less as a helpful companion.
I will do that. Thanks for responding.
One last thought: This problem is on HP xw4600 workstation-towers. At the risk of ragging on the MS folks again, they do things like set BIOS passwords and set Safe-Boot and such as their idea of "securing" the workstation. Could any BIOS misconfigurations be causing this roadblock ?