giving bootp request ONLY once

[Yayati Singh]

 Simon Hobson wrote: Yayati Singh wrote: I have a typical scenario, where
thebootp info needs to be served ONLY once. An typical usage would be
installing windows,where windows reboots three times, and for the rest of
thetime dhcpd need not server the client with any bootp info. Any work
aroundon dhcpd or hack to its code would be helpfull. I don't follow, why
don't you want to service this client more than once ? Do you really mean
bootp, or dhcp ? What are you trying to achieve ? I meant bootp, 
Since every time the machine would boot it would get a bootp directive and
start re-installing the OS ( i use pxe ). So i have to sit down on the
machine console every time it reboots for the first time and do the
following:
#1 change the boot order in the BIOS, to boot from the hardisk.
or
#2  Change the dhcp.conf and comment the particular host, restart dhcpd.
i want to avoid all these and do an un-attended installation of OS when
needed, without sitting on the console to do some manual intervention in
preventing the machine going in a reboot loop.

The other application is we have many appliances, which we kickstart from
time to time, but we need not always reboot the appliances with kickstarting
in mind, so on post install on the first reboot we have to manually disable
PXE boot on the appliances. This whole process gets painfull.  We wanted to
see if we can control bootp from dhcpd itself. Hence controlling OS
installations when ever needed.

We have one method which could be a starting point, listen for dhcpd syslog
messages for serving the particular client, and after serving the client
message is found modify dhcpd.conf and restart dhcpd not to serve that
clientagain. but dhcpd does not give a clean message of bootp on the syslog.

Any more ideas ??
Simon