The primary advantage is the ability to do everything through httpd.
This gives you the ability to bypass the layer 2 restriction of DHCP
without having to resort to tricks like Cisco's ip-helper. This isn't
the only advantage - gpxe lets you boot remotely over a LOT of
different medium (AoE, iscsi, etc.). The newer versions of kvm/libvirt
have built-in gpxe support for their virtual NIC drivers, so chain
loading for a KVM guest isn't even required.
Thanks... that makes sense.
Seems like we *would* always be using httpd, though, in our case?. So
I guess, to userland, the advantage is "it's faster and probably can
boot more nodes at once".
This follows.
I guess what I'm curious about is *IF* it will work on all legacy
hardware, do we still need the old path around as a default? i.e.
maybe normal PXE becomes the weird fallback option?
Or does that not make sense?
Maybe there's not a good reason though, and we suspect gpxe will not
work everywhere? Not sure what is offered in terms of boot menus,
etc. Keeping those available
would be important if we tried to do that.
(I'm also a bit curious why VMware ESX won't boot from pxelinux.0, but
that's just for my info and unrelated)
> + ks_mirror_name =
string.join(distro.kernel.split('/')[-2:-1],'')
> 862
>
> FYI -- This seems to imply the distro must be mirrored by Cobbler.
> It seems like the code needs to anticipate this this possibility?
Yes and no - there's no reason the http server in question has to be
cobbler. Covering that case would be a todo, but I didn't give it
priority since I believe the number of people who use the
--available-as option are relatively small. I'm pretty sure that
option doesn't work with esxi4 either (since at least 6 files need to
be copied to the tftp directory), so I figured the people who'd use
this feature right now for esxi5 wouldn't care about that limitation
IIRC, --available-as isan option to import.
I was thinking about the manual "cobbler distro add" case, where you
might not even have a "tree" parameter at all, and the files might
live on NFS somewhere.
I'd probably attempt to make sure the path *looked* like a cobbler
path, and if not, maybe raise an error or something.
Maybe this is just the way I percieved it, but I basically view import
as a shortcut path around distro add/profile add/etc, not the path you
always have to go down.
Anyway, some way to yell at you if you're doing it wrong seemed to be
my point.
if distro.kernel.find("ks_mirror") != -1:
raise Exception("...")
or something like that
--Michael