Michael DeHaan wrote:
Terry McIntyre wrote:
> OIC. Didn't realize that DHCP in your environment is handled by AD. My
> cobbler environment, like a lot of others, manages DHCP directly. I
> haven't tried it, but I believe that cobbler systems are actually able
> to negotiate with other DHCP servers, possibly including AD servers.
>
Totally, cobbler does not have to auto-manage your DHCP and it can be on
another box easily.
You just need to get your AD admin to assign the next server for that
block of machines. I'm pretty sure it's doable and has been done before.
BTW, please avoid top posting if you can help it :)
For what its worth this is exactly how I deployed cobbler into our
existing PXE environment. I used out existing DHCP server simply changed
the next-server argument to point to Cobbler and it works great.
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 12:59 PM, Terry McIntyre
<terry.mcintyre(a)gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>> work. In our organization, we have sevaral VLANs that span across two
>>>> geographic locations that, ideally, would have access to both Altiris
>>>> and
>>>> Cobbler Install servers. I'm shooting for the ability to sit down
at
>>>> any
>>>> workstation at any location, select PXE boot, and have the ability to
>>>> choose
>>>> Altiris or Cobbler.
How I resolved a very similar problem was to create a simple web page
with buttons on it allowing the selection of what PXE server you want to
use as the next-server to PXE boot to. This then runs a simple script to
run sed and change the next-server argument in the dhcpd.conf file and
restart the dhcp server, etc. It works pretty well, just had to give the
web server sudo privileges to run the couple commands needed, and I
moved dhcpd.conf to the vhost web directory and made it owned by apache
and symlinked it to /etc - Now I can do exactly as you say and change
the PXE server I will use no matter my location, etc.
I think in your case you DHCP server is Windows so this might be harder
to implement, I know you could use something like Cygwin to run the sed
command to change the next-server argument, but I have no idea how to
script something on Windows to allow Apache to restart the DHCP service
and have the permissions to do so. Maybe convince your guys to use a
Linux DHCP server? (Might not be possible I know.)
Cheers,
Pete