[ipxe-devel] Non-embedded IP Configuration

[Matthew Walster]

On Sat, 2 Feb 2019, 16:29 shouldbe q931 <shouldbeq931 at gmail.com wrote:

>
> So, asking the dumb question, if you are not chainloading from PXE
> using DHCP, what are you booting iPXE from ? a USB stick ? physical
> optical media? virtual ISO ? burnt into ROM ?
>

Today, I'm not, but the proposed intention is to either burn into ROM or
integrate into a boot partition / UEFI system partition on all the attached
drives. They will only store data and no OS code.

If burnt into ROM, then you I would suggest creating a ROM for each
> machine with the address and script etc. The ROM creation etc could be
> automated from each host from https://rom-o-matic.eu/ or an intermal
> similar service (see the rom-o-matic sources
> https://github.com/xbgmsharp/ipxe-buildweb/ for a a starting point).
>

See below

Alternatively, if you control the machines, but not the network, how
> about creating a DHCP/PXE server on one or more of the remote hosts ?
>

I control the machine, but not the network, it is deployed at third party
sites -- and in between shipping and deployment the IP addressing can
change. Likewise, a device may need to be reconfigured while deployed, so
being able to refer to a variable rather than embedding a constant into the
binary would allow me to reconfigure that register from the OS rather than
build and deploy an entire new binary built specifically for that machine.

Having a single binary across the platform is desirable, not just because
it's easier to maintain, but also because we don't have to frequently risk
the hardware with reflashing the EEPROM.

At the moment, I'm only really interested in using it as a rescue mode
(disks are hosed, needs rebootstrapping without RMA of the box) but I had
ideas about maybe just downloading the operating system image on each boot.

Thanks for the input!

M

>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ipxe.org/pipermail/ipxe-devel/attachments/20190202/bbfb0b8d/attachment.htm>