Do you have reservations in the DHCP server? Or are the addresses truly
dynamic?
Dynamic, any "servers" that would require forwarding I just run on my server
Are you relying on the client's UEFI implementation to provide the menu?
Or are you using PXELINUX for the menu? (I know it's a nuance, but it
is a difference.) The latter is much easier to centrally manage than
the former.
----Actually I haven't found the need for a menu at all, dnsmasq serves
whatever kernel I have symbolically linked to the clients from their boot folder
Does the UEFI stack get the same IP via DHCP that the OS gets via DHCP?
Is there any sort of contention? Does UEFI release the IP before
bootstrapping the PXELINUX image? Does the DHCP server view the
multiple requests from the same client MAC as a form of a refresh? Or
does it just offer the same IP?
----I've had this same IP for months on this machine, I would assume the same
for the others, as far as log messages from the server, it answers the same to
each request from the same mac as far back I I've scrolled through
Are all clients booting the same kernel, thus using the same command line?
This means that clients must use DHCP to retrieve their IP address.
---Yes all are booting the same kernel
I guess there is some opportunity to return different files (PXELINUX
image / config and / or kernel file) to different clients to get
different behavior. But that might be more complexity than is necessary.
Would you please share the kernel command line? I'm quite curious what
the syntax is for NFS root.
---- ip=dhcp root=/dev/nfs rootfstype=nfs rw
nfsroot=ServerIP:/diskless/root,nolock,fsc,tcp,proto=tcp,vers=4,nfsvers=4.2,rsize=1048576,wsize=1048576
raid=noautodetect
That makes me think that you are using a separate NFS export for each
machine's root.
---all the same root, I actually just have a custom bash script in local.d
(openrc) for handling specifics for each node (adding dvd/blueray whatever to
fstab)
I have wondered about trying to do something similar (likely start in a
VM) that has (at least) one machine specific export for things like
/etc, but would then try to use a common export for things like /usr,
/lib, and maybe /var.
--- anything that conflicts like /var/log I just have as tmpfs on each machine
- What is common between the diskless clients and what is unique.
- PXELINUX image / config
- Kernel image
- NFS exports
- What do your exports look like.
- What sort of configuration you have in your DHCP server that's
specific to this.
- Any sticky reservations, possibly with machine specific parameters.
- Other things that I can't think of at the moment.
Thank you again. Very interesting stuff.
--- https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Diskless_nodes I got my start from reading
that, well unless you count doing diskless with ubuntu in the way way past, my
hard drive died then and I wasn't about to just use a livedvd unable to really
install anything lol
