Hi,

A long time ago I asked and later documented on Stack Overflow how to do PXE if you do not have control over the central DHCP server.
http://serverfault.com/questions/53116/howto-setup-cobbler-with-pxe-if-you-cant-change-the-dhcp-server

A few months ago I got an email from someone stating he couldn't get the above to work.  He also stated 

    I sent an email about this issue to the cobbler mailing list and even
    Michael Dehaan, the cobbler creator, did not know about this
    possibility, so I think your input would be useful to many people.

So that is the purpose of this mail; It may be useful to you guys.

Turns out that I had done some fixing and changing of my own cobbler (long time ago) that I had forgotten about.
So a few days ago I provided the crucial fix to the mainline cobbler which has now become part of the trunk. 
https://github.com/cobbler/cobbler/pull/157
I also created some additional supporting documentation to explain in broad terms how to use this.
http://howto.basjes.nl/linux/doing-pxe-without-dhcp-control

The mentioned fix also has another usecase which I have deployed several times.
I can now define a MAC address, IP address, hostname combination in cobbler and instruct it to install CentOS with a kickstart file that also installs puppet.
Because with this fix the client gets a fixed hostname I can use puppet to cleanly define what software needs to be installed.

In addition I can choose to omit the IP address and has a situation where the client gets a fixed hostname in an environment where I leave the IP addresses dynamic.
This last usecase is something I see as a viable scenario for deploying roaming Linux desktops/laptops and maintaining control over the installed software using a tool like puppet.

--
Met vriendelijke groeten,

Niels Basjes