are you sure you're solving the right problem? in a production environment, do you really want production machines to continue to boot to PXE, load an installation kernel, and only then discover that a bootable local disk exists and reboot from that? it seems dangerous to allow a situation to continue where a misconfiguration of your PXE server could cause all your production machines to start re-installing themselves.
it would seem more sensible to me to set up the machines to only boot to PXE if the local disk isn't bootable. does your hardware not allow it, forcing you to either always boot from PXE first, or never boot from it at all? -ken On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 12:58 PM, Nick Bender <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm working on a new version of the fully automated installation routine > that I had developed for 4.4. One problem that people have identified > using a PXE based install is that it's possible to get in a loop where > you PXE boot and do the install and then restart and get back to the > PXE boot routine and end up repeatedly installing. > > I'm wondering if a way around that is for the install routine to mount > the target drive and check to see if the install has already been done. > If it has been done then go ahead and boot from that device. So the > question is can the ramdisk kernel cause the machine to boot from > a device without going through the bios? Something like running > boot(8) from a running system... > > Thanks, > -N
