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.
In researching this question, I haven't come up with much. PXE
documentation for Linux tools doesn't seem to address such a scenario.
Other documentation I've found on the web indicates that *some* systems
(namely Windows RIS) have the ability to do such redirection, though it is
unclear whether this redirection is menu driven or not. Altiris
documentation yields no clues for how I might have an Altiris menu option
that simply redirects to my cobbler server, without rebuilding the menu
every time I make a change. 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). 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.
Perhaps this could become an enhancement request? Any guidance would be
appreciated.
--
Brandon