All new systems come with IPMI. You could use the IPMI interface to get lots of information and probably even the mac. Best of all, you won't need to load any OS. Just configure the IPMI interface and off you go.
corey On Feb 26, 2009, at 12:25 AM, Matthew Barr wrote:
I was going back through older mail and found this. We expect to build a bunch of new boxes in the next few months, and I'd love to have an easy way to add their mac's to Cobbler. We also have other boxes that aren't in cobbler yet, that would be handy to be able to run a koan command to add the MACs to a specific profile.
The base tool might be as simple as a koan option to register a new profile. So workflow would be:
PXE boot. loads a quick shell to enter the name of machine, and the IP. That adds the the new system record and reboots to kick the system via a koan --replace-self.
Seems like it might be nice and easy, and despite needing a keyboard attached at 1st power on, there would not be any typing of MAC addresses. If you had a pattern for names, you could generate the name, and IPs, and such things off a single line entry, scripted by the end user.
We key off the rack and a machine number in the rack, so it's as easy as typing in 2 numbers, and then hitting enter.
Annoying, because we have to console into each box, but necessary. I'm not sure how you'd distinguish each system from the next if you didn't manually tell the system what it's name was, but it could be used to kick a rack of boxes that all get an ip range, but only want a dynamic DHCP setup when they are uncrated, vs running all the time.
Thoughts?
On Jan 30, 2009, at 5:55 PM, Michael DeHaan wrote:
Jared Hodge wrote:
- Better baremetal building support without every connecting a
keyboard
(i.e. I order the systems with PXE boot set). I see this mentioned in ticket 301. I don't know that the specific implementation suggested would be best - it would be best not to have any sort of "install" be the default, but if we can find a way of easily registering MAC addresses for assignment to profiles that would be very helpful. https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/ticket/301
Thinking aloud, this could possibly be done with a special option added to koan and a kickstart that does that and then reboots in %pre before any further installation occurs. This could be done using any installer kernel/initrd as a basis.
(Adding and calling a koan --register, basically)
Sound workable? The underlying mechanics would be quite trivial.
Matthew Barr InteractiveOne - Senior System Engineer e:mbarr@interactiveone.com c:646.765.6878 aim: matthewbarr1
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