[cobbler] Enabling pxe boot option via ipmi?

Nishanth Aravamudan nacc at linux.vnet.ibm.com
Tue Aug 12 21:40:40 UTC 2014


On 12.08.2014 [14:36:50 -0400], Jennifer Patrick wrote:
> Hiya.
> 
> Just wondering if anyone has figured out a way via the API, or how to
> show-horn it into the web-interface, to enable cobbler to set a pxe boot
> flag on a system.  Currently in cobbler we can do the equivalent of:
> 
> ipmitool -H 1.2.3.4 -U USER -P PASS chassis power on
> ipmitool -H 1.2.3.4 -U USER -P PASS chassis power off

Well, and that itself is done via the fence commands, right? Not via
cobbler proper at all.

> for powering on/off...
> 
> 
> But can we enable a way to do:
> ipmitool -H 1.2.3.4 -U USER -P PASS chassis bootdev pxe   ?

This is slightly more reasonably done in Cobbler proper, as only Cobbler
knows if a system is about to be netboot'd (can check for
netboot_enabled is True for a system object). I would think you could do
it via a trigger, though? I'm not sure on the timing you would need, but
pre-install makes some sense (if pre-install comes before power-cycle)
or otherwise, you could do it on the sync that's necessary to setup the
PXE files anyways. But there, you could look for any systems that have
their power management set to impitool and run the command you mention
above.

I don't think you want to extend the fence agent itself, just because
then it will try and set the bootdev to pxe every time you power-cycle,
which isn't exactly what you want to do.

Thanks,
Nish



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