Brandon Young wrote:
My situation is this: long before I came to our organization, the
Windows administrators built an Altiris deployment server to roll out
Windows in our organization. When I came along many moons ago, the
first thing I did was set up a kickstart system. I then discovered,
and have been using, cobbler since the pre-1.0 days for deploying
Linux servers and workstations. Since Altiris predated my setup, I
had to figure out how to shoe-horn cobbler into the existing PXE
configuration on our network (DHCP, DNS, menus, etc). The solution I
devised worked *okay* for a while. It was a bit of a pain, because
every time I updated the cobbler menu, or added a profile, or new
system, I had to manually copy all the related pxe files over to the
altiris server and rebuild the boot menu before the changes could be
available to booting clients. Lately, though, the Altiris management
has fallen to very low priority, and some ill thought out network
changes have been made that resulted in the PXE services proivded by
Altiris very unreliable. Additionally, it has become clear that the
Linux group makes much heavier use of the PXE service than does the
Windows group. So, it makes more sense to figure out how to
"shoe-horn" Altiris into a cobbler environment than the other way around.
What I am attempting to figure out is if there is some simple way to
refer a pxe client (on request) to a different PXE server? What I
envision is something like: a client PXE boots, and is presented with
the cobbler menu, which contains a menu entry (in addition to all my
normal entries) titled "Altiris" that, when selected, redirects the
requesting client to Altiris, where it loads the PXE boot menu managed
on the altiris server.
The next-server variable in dhcpd.conf can be modified to point any
network at any PXE server.
This is very easy to do and should be fine, assuming Altiris does not
have to control your DHCP to function. If it does, let it have DHCP
only the machines it needs to know about.
Another idea I have come across includes something manually
intensive
like maintaining a list of MAC addresses on the PXE server to which
the PXE server will respond (and ignore all others, causing them to
try a different PXE server).
Yes you could also set this on a per-MAC basis if the Windows machines
weren't on a different network.
I realize it is an option to relegate the Altiris server to its own
subnet, and have cobbler live in another subnet. Everyone in my
organization is agreeable to this solution, as it would not change the
Windows group's workflow, but it would be very nice if I could somehow
redirect clients to Altiris if needed, still. It would be even better
if cobbler could take over as the master PXE server on all subnets and
just redirect to Altiris on demand, though.
Is what I'm seeking even possible? Is there a simple menu entry I can
template in that would redirect a client to a different server? Is
this documented somewhere (and could you point me to it)? By the way,
I am using cobbler 1.4.2 on a CentOS 5.2 server.
Yeah, you don't do this at the PXE config level -- you do this at the
DHCP level. Hope that helps?
--Michael