[5219] in Release_7.7_team
Re: using wanboot for Sun installs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert A Basch)
Sat Jul 30 14:29:53 2005
From: Robert A Basch <rbasch@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <200507210436.j6L4a4Ai028648@anhedonia.mit.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2005 14:29:39 -0400
Message-Id: <1122748179.7836.26.camel@anhedonia.mit.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0
X-Spam-Score: 1.041
X-Spam-Level: * (1.041)
X-Spam-Flag: NO
On Thu, 2005-07-21 at 00:36 -0400, Robert A Basch wrote:
> A variation on this command might be to append the IP address
> to the client-id, instead of supplying the host-id parameter; we may
> need to do this if the DHCP server requires the client ID to be unique,
> as I suspect
It does seem that including the IP address in the identifier is the way
to go. I believe that the DHCP server will require the identifier to be
unique, to be able to support installing two machines at the same
time. Also, relying on the host-ip setting is problematic, since there
is no good way to determine that the installer actually set it (the
value will be the dynamically assigned address if not given on the
command line).
In recent testing, though, I encountered an apparent bug in the
wanboot software. For certain values of the client-id parameter,
the value returned by netbootinfo (the magic program which
retrieves wanboot parameter settings) has trailing garbage. I
will pursue this problem with Sun. But even if this bug cannot
be fixed, I think we can deal with it by prepending the IP address
to the identifier (assuming that any garbage is trailing), instead
of appending. So the boot command line would be something like:
boot net:18.179.0.20,wanboot,18.x.y.z -o client-id=18.x.y.z-athena-sun,dhcp
(where 18.x.y.z is the client's "real" IP address). As a fallback,
if the boot script fails to parse the address from the client-id
setting, it could prompt the user for a valid address. An alternative
would be for the installer to supply a value for the "hostname"
parameter, and have the miniroot use the DHCP IP address until the
host name could be resolved. However, the installer would also be
responsible for supplying a unique client-id in this scenario, so
I think putting the IP address in the client-id is preferable. (I
have verified that any trailing garbage in the client-id setting
is internal to wanboot, i.e. is not transmitted to either the
DHCP server or web server).
> Unfortunately, though, I also found
> that there are apparent performance problems with wanboot on a Solaris
> 9 server
The good news is that this problem was not evident in my recent testing
on sunburn, the test install server, which is now running 9.3.18, same
as the SunBlade 1500 on which I did my initial Solaris 9 testing. So
maybe we don't need to worry about this so much.
Bob
