[CentOS] Interesting PXE server setup question

[Garrick Staples]

On Thu, Jan 24, 2008 at 10:36:56AM -0500, Rob Lines alleged:
> While this is not a problem with CentOS I am hoping to solve the situation
> using a CentOS machine.  For anyone not interested I am sorry to clutter
> your mail box.  For everyone else any ideas or suggestions are welcome.
> 
> A bit of background:
> 
> We have an application that runs only in DOS 6.22 at the moment that we
> would like to run on all of our desktop computers each time they boot up.
> Our workstations are mostly Windows XP with some Linux.
> 
> Our goals:
> 
> We would like to be able to have the machines boot into DOS and run the
> application and then reboot to the normal hard drive.  We would like to have
> it require no user intervention or as little as possible.  We would also
> like to have it only run the app during the first boot up of the day.

Sounds similar to how xCAT manages nodes in an HPC cluster when using local OS
installs.

Nodes' BIOS are set to netboot first, and harddrive second.  In the event of
tftp/dhcp not functioning, the nodes will boot normally.

Scripts on the PXE server write PXE config files that cause the nodes to local
boot (the common state), boot a kickstart installer, or any other misc boot
image.  DOS images are commonly used to configure BIOS and NVRAM.

The trick is getting a .bat script in the DOS image to run a command on the PXE
server that eventually re-writes the PXE config file.  One method is to use a
tiny DOS tcp stack and ssh client (yes, this exists and works great).  Another
method is to connect to a daemon running on the PXE server.  The former
requires shell/bat scripting, the later requires some actual programming.



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