Future of Stateless Linux

[Jonathan Andrews]

On Mon, 2004-10-04 at 20:28, Rudi Chiarito wrote:
> I was reading the Stateless Linux tutorial last night. I have a few
> questions regarding some issues and how the project will tackle them, if
> at all.
> 
> I haven't actually tried the software yet, but at work we're having a
> new cluster shipped today and this means I have an official excuse to
> play with stuff later this week. My perspective focuses mostly on the
> needs of clusters and similar setups (blade servers, etc.). I understand
> that, at least initially, the project will mainly target desktop
> clients. I also understand that we're still in the early stages.
> 
> On to the issues.
> 
> 1) IP addresses
> 
> There are several sides to this. The basic premise is that some might
> prefer static IP addresses and names for boxes. If I have, say, 30
> blades, I would like the blade with the sticker "20" on it to actually
> be called "node020". And the one next to it to be called "node021". The
> tutorial simply avoids the issue, showing how to set up a DHCP setup
> with 100% dynamic IPs. You could consider this issue orthogonal to
> serving images and root filesystems, but I think an integrated approach
> is preferrable.
> 
> The obvious solution here is to resort to Ethernet MAC addresses.
> Section 5 (Setting up diskless clients) "solves" the issue by just
> saying "Determine the MAC address of the client(s)". That's not as
> automated as one would wish and, more importantly, still doesn't take
> care of IP addresses and names - it just changes the PXE boot image for
> that MAC address. My question here is: are there any plans to tackle
> this?

Im not an expert, but heres my take on the same problem.

Just a point of interest you can tell the dhcp server to keep handing
out the same IP address to a machine using MAC. So if a machine is
configured to with no hostname and a working name resolver it should
have the same IP booth during boot and after boot.

Example from my LAN, the sun always gets 10.10.10.200, the masqurading
DNS servers calls this "ultra1", the machine itself has no hostname so
it always called "ultra1" after boot.

host ultra1 {
        hardware ethernet 08:00:20:7c:9d:f5;
        option domain-name "jonshouse";
        fixed-address 10.10.10.200;
        option host-name "ultra1";
        #option root-path
"10.10.10.80:/disk3/netboot/sparc_ultra1_root";
        option domain-name-servers 10.10.10.80;
}