[ipxe-devel] Non-embedded IP Configuration

[Christian Nilsson]

On Mon, 4 Feb 2019 at 01:21, Matthew Walster <dotwaffle at gmail.com> wrote:
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> On Sat, 2 Feb 2019, 16:29 shouldbe q931 <shouldbeq931 at gmail.com wrote:
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>> 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 ?
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> 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.
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>> 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).
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> See below
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>> 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 ?
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> Thanks for the input!
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> M

in EFI mode the file:// protocol is supported which allow you to load
for example scripts from local filesystem.
to do this you have to do ifopen, and then chain file://
That script could than have the ip configuration.
However there is no support for saving files - you need to do that from some OS.
another nice thing is that you can run config net0 for example to have
an easy way to configure the settings.

Hope that maybe some of that is helpful.
/Christian