Re: Jumpstart x86: How not to PXE after jumpstart finishes and reboots ...

On 1 Dec 2005 13:03:45 -0800, Noelle said something similar to:
:
: BTW... Earlier in the thread the following was mentioned as a
: possibility to
: implementing complete hands-off jumpstarting (which I assume also
: means no F-12 since my initial post specified complete hands off
: jumpstarting).
: Not sure if/how this works, but it's worth a re-mention here (... I'll
: be looking into
: it myself).
: >>
: >> With Solaris Express and S10 update 1 you can have a grubmenu booted
: >> over the net which first defaults to booting an install image using
: >> PXE and later resets it after the install is complete to booting from
: >> disk.

I'm not sure, but what Casper may be refering to here is having the grub
menu file on the boot server change post-install to boot from the hard drive
rather than doing another install.

I've got a setup like that running for one of my clients' Linux
clusters. Here's how we do it:

There are two grub menus - one that boots from the network to perform the
install, and another that boots from the hard disk. For each client, there
is a symlink which in normal operation points at the grub menu for booting
from the local disk. That symlink is the path that the DHCP server hands to
the client.

To reinstall a system, we point the symlink for that client at the install
menu, and reboot the client machine. During postinstall, the client logs
into the boot server via ssh with a restricted key, causing the symlink to
be pointed back at the menu file that boots from disk.

This of course does require that the DHCP server be configured to hand
a different grubmenu path to each client. Since I'm already configuring
it to hand out fixed addresses to the cluster nodes, I don't find this
to be a big issue for the site I'm describing. You might feel differently.
.