[syslinux] PXELinux and serial number

[Scott Mewett]

Very cool.

Were in the design stage of our project right now. I should know in the
next few weeks if it gets approved to build out a working concept. If
that happens then I'll try and get some hardware or $$ donation for your
effort.

The general idea of the project is to build a managed pxe system.
External applications would register with a database backed system to
setup boot choices for a particular serial number.
The backend system would control the creation of the tftp config files
for pxelinux. For example a sysadmin would go through a web page and
create a profile for a server to be kickstarted. The backend would
create an appropriate pxelinux config file for that serial number or mac
address. The the server would pxe boot using the config for that server.

For that scenario you don't need a back end db, but we want to expand it
way beyond that, so that you can boot systems for example without a
config, go to a web page to show unprovisioned servers and then create
your config from there. Once you finish your config on the web page the
system would take care of rebooting the box automatically so that the
install could start.
We are also thinking of having systems always pxe boot, even though the
system may tell it to boot of the hard disk. There may also be systems
that will boot and run over the network without using an OS on a hard
disk. We want all that controlled by the db backend. All of the config
files in the tftpboot dir could be recreated at will using the data in
the db.

There are commercial systems that do some of this. But none that really
do everything we want or are too closed a system to expand and do
additional things.

Is anyone aware of any open source systems that already do some of this?
Sorry if this is a little of topic. But since I want to base it on
pxelinux, I figured this would be a good audience to bring it up with.

It is my intention, if I get support from my employer, to open source
this system as well. I've been successful with that on a couple other
project I've done.

Needless to say, pxelinux rocks. :-)

Thanks
Scott


On Fri, 2005-03-18 at 18:03 -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> Scott Mewett wrote:
> > 
> > Since there is only the serial number that we are looking for, being
> > able to read all the table structures would not be necessary.
> > 
> > What do you think?
> > 
> 
> Doesn't look too bad.  Find the _DMI_ header in the BIOS ROM area, then 
> it's just a linked list of tables, and the serial number is in table 1. 
>   Get the index, and scan past the requisite number of nulls, to find 
> the appropriate string; if there is no _DMI_ header, if table 1 doesn't 
> exist or is less than 8 bytes long, the string number is zero, or 
> finding double-null during the scan is an error, meaning no data is 
> available.
> 
> This should be doable.
> 
> 	-hpa