PXEBOOT confsued by dhcrelay -- two gids ?

[David W. Hankins]

On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 11:12:20PM -0700, Robinson Tiemuqinke wrote:
>  Thanks a lot.. You are one of the greatest geniuses
> I've ever met.

...I suspect you don't get out much then!

>  So my workaround is pretty stupid but works: I just
> fire up the dhcpd service on orignal dhc relay server
> with exactly the same dhcpd.conf configuration file
> copied from orignal central server, Because the router
> blocks dhcpd traffic, I don't need to concern that the
> clients will receive reply from wrong server.

Actually that's not stupid at all, that's a much
better idea than setting the relay to ip-forward.

Why didn't I think of that?

> It is quite stupid but as you said, I have no way -- I
> got hundreds of these crappy pxeboot clients and I

They're not that bad...I suspect you just have a really
old version.

> don't like the idea to burn NIC firmware with floppies
> after powering off machines one by one(Does Linux
> supports firmware-burning on-line?? ). Nevetheless,

I have no idea.  It seems to me it would have been a
cool idea if you could give the pxeboot clients an
image that burned a new image onto the NICs.

If vendor-class-identifier sent by pxeboot (I don't
know if it does this) identified its version number,
you could flash old versions and give new versions
their network booting orders.

Surely someone has done that by now?

If a floppy image exists that burns the firmware and
then reboots the machine, I think you can load that
via pxelinux ('floppy image' loading hacks are how we
use pxelinux to network-boot and install FreeBSD 6
around here).

> after three years these machines will be phased out
> and probably are sent to somewhere I have never heard
> before.

Brings new meaning to 'planned obsolesence'.  I
don't think the people who originally coined that
phrase had sysadmins with bats in mind.  Waiting
to visit revenge upon the hardware.

> Thanks again for figuring out my problem so precisely
> and quickly.

Glad I could help.

-- 
David W. Hankins		"If you don't do it right the first time,
Software Engineer			you'll just have to do it again."
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.		-- Jack T. Hankins