[syslinux] [PATCH] MAC Address Ranges

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Sun, 2011-03-27 at 07:42 -0400, Gene Cumm wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 23:32, Jason Hiatt <jason.hiatt at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I'm new here so bear with me.  I am working on a project at work where
> > we are replacing 1000+ Dell servers.
> > When a new Dell server is delivered to one of our remote offices it
> > will PXE boot off of the existing Dell server and install openSuse and
> > then configure itself.
> > We also PXE boot windows PCs in the remote offices so we needed a way
> > to assign a large range of MAC addresses to a specific config file.
> > We have the MAC address ranges for all of the Dell servers that will
> > be installed in the remote offices; so, now we can distribute a file
> > called 01-BC-05-CD to all of the existing servers and be confident
> > that the new servers will load the PXE config file that it's supposed
> > to.
> >
> > The path below will take the client's MAC address and walk through
> > (almost) all of the MAC address ranges.
> 
> Interesting idea.  I'd assume that you have one of three situations.
> It's semi-automated (requires a user to choose the install option but
> defaults to a local disk boot), you disable the PXE boot as a part of
> the install, or PXE boot is after a local disk boot and the local disk
> boot fails over properly to PXE.
> 
> I can think of another three ways to solve this:
> 
> 1) Symlinks, although in this case it'd be rather unusable due to the
> number needed (~16,000,000).
> 
> 2) Reconfiguring your DHCP server to forcibly assign a config based on
> MAC address.  At
> http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/PXELINUX#Can_I_send_information_to_PXELINUX_via_special_options_in_the_DHCP_response.3F
> there's an example that uses binary-to-ascii to set option 209 for
> ISC-DHCPD.  This config is tried before attempting the search.
> 
> In one part specify:
> option space pxelinux;
> option pxelinux.configfile code 209 = text;
> 
> In another part specify:
> site-option-space "pxelinux";
> if ( substring (binary-to-ascii(16, 8, ":", substring(hardware, 1,
> 8)), offset, 9) = "1:bc:5:cd" ) {
>     if exists dhcp-parameter-request-list {
>         option dhcp-parameter-request-list = concat(option
> dhcp-parameter-request-list,d1);
>     }
>     option pxelinux.configfile "pxelinux.cfg/01-BC-05-CD";
> }
> 
> 
> 3) Having a first config that uses COM32 module(s) that evaluates
> things like the MAC and proceeds to the next config based on that.
> How it does so would be based on how you have configured your existing
> environment.

4) Use hpa's TFTP server, and do the mapping in tftp.map, which allows
you to match requested filenames against arbitrary RE's.

-- Jeff