On 09/25/2013 12:52 AM, Dan Egli wrote:
That's an interesting approach. I've never even heard of tcpclient before,
so that's a new one. I take it $TCPLOCALIP would be the IP address of the
default route? I.e. eth0's address? Any way to obtain the card's MAC
address with that?
Still, baring any research into the dhclient hooks, I think ifconfig's
output is the most reliable way for me to obtain the info I need.
Especially as I'd be looking for the MAC address in this instance too.
Here's basically what I'm after (and yes, it's kind of convoluted. But the
guy I was explaining this network setup wants to be supremely lazy
regarding updating the config files for dhcpd and the named zone files):
Given an office consisting of two buildings, given a server GW, which has
three network adapters: eth0 = gateway to the world, eth1 = local
workstations (same building as GW resides in), eth2 = workstations in the
other building. Given that except for GW, no machine would have a hard disk
drive or solid state drive.
What he wants (and what I've been scripting for him) is so that when a new
machine that has never booted onto that network connects for the first time
(this is only for PXE booting. If a machine has it's hard drive then this
doesn't work), it boots into a tiny NFS root who's only purpose is to
record IP and MAC info, then obtain a hostname from the user. At this point
it writes all this to the server and flags the server (semaphor file in
this case, rather than sockets). Then a program on the server would take
this information, record a new DHCP reservation for that MAC, and record
the machine's IP in the local DNS program, and restarts both, at which
point it deletes the semaphor file. Once the file is deleted, the script on
the new workstation sees it, and reboots itself. Once this reboot begins it
grabs a DIFFERENT nfs root (via a /tftpboot/pxelinux.conf/<MAC> file
instead of reading /tftpboot/pxelinux.conf/default), and boots into the
nfsroot for that computer. The reason he wants to do it this way is because
he wants a separate NFS root for computers in office 1 vs in office 2, and
for them to be on a separate subnet. This way, he doesn't have to update
configuration files (like I said, lazy) when machines are added to the
network. The network updates itself.
it sounds like you have already built most of this so this suggestion
might not be of much value. have you looked at using ipxe [1] for this?
it can be used with pxe to do all kinds of cool things like booting from
http, iscsi, fcoe, or others and has a limited scripting ability. ipxe
could do a workflow like this:
* system pxe boots which loads ipxe
* ipxe makes a http to a webserver providing its own mac and ip addresses
* the webserver does a lookup of the mac address and create dns/dhcp
entries if they aren't known
* the webserver then returns a configuration script for ipxe to load
the kernel and ramdisk with the proper kernel cmdline options
* ipxe loads the kernel and ramdisk and continues the boot process
this seems like it would be a bit of a cleaner way to implement this
whole process. the ipxe scripting provides variables for easy access to
the ip and mac addresses and some user input and menu functionality.
i've been working on a side project that works almost like this but the
web service will be twiddling bits on iscsi targets to change what iscsi
lun a systems boots from dynamically. ipxe is some cool stuff but it
would be a large design change from what you're working on.
[1] http://ipxe.org/
So, I wrote up a setup that does exactly that. I was just wondering if
parsing ifconfig and grepping for the MAC and IP in there was the best way
to obtain the information (I really dislike playing around with grep/cut
combinations when I can avoid it) or if there was a better way. But if
grepping ifconfig is that common, then I guess it works for me. It DOES
work (as far as I can tell, I haven't had a chance to actually test it
yet), but it just seems kind of ugly/convoluted to me. Oh well. What the
boss/client wants, the boss/client gets, as long as it's not TOO
unreasonable. :) Gotta love working with federal government employees.
__NOT__.
Anyway, thanks for the tips all!
--- Dan
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