Syslinux - Feb 2004 - Syslinux using Asset Tag (from Dell or Compay) instead of MAC Adress

I am using PXELINUX to unattened install our machines with XP.

It is a not very easy to handle with mac adresses because mac
adresses can change when a motherboard is changed, but the asset tag
from dell (or also from compaq) will be also updated when the motherboard is 
changed to the
original value, so our unique key here is the asset tag.

So my idea is to change the behaviour so that it will not check
for the configuration file on the server by using the mac adress, instead
of this i want to read the asset tag from the bios and use this key
to determine the pxelinux config file.

Has anyone maybe already done this?

huber at hsn.at wrote:
> I am using PXELINUX to unattened install our machines with XP.
> 
> It is a not very easy to handle with mac adresses because mac
> adresses can change when a motherboard is changed, but the asset tag
> from dell (or also from compaq) will be also updated when the motherboard
is
> changed to the original value, so our unique key here is the asset tag.
> 
Well, presumably you have a database somewhere of which MAC address go
with which machine.
>
> So my idea is to change the behaviour so that it will not check
> for the configuration file on the server by using the mac adress, instead
> of this i want to read the asset tag from the bios and use this key
> to determine the pxelinux config file.
> 
> Has anyone maybe already done this?
> 
Is there a spec for obtaining the value of this asset tag?

The big problem I see with it is that it's state kept local on the
machine, so if it's wrong it could be hard to fix, but I guess that's
not my problem :)

	-hpa

"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa at zytor.com> writes:
> Is there a spec for obtaining the value of this asset tag?
(I think the original poster meant "service tag".  Dell uses the term
"asset tag" to mean something else.)

There is no spec that I know of.

However, there is the asset.com utility
(ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/utility/asset.com); perhaps someone could
disassemble it.

But it may not even work on modern Dells, where the service tag
appears as the "Serial Number" fields of both the System Information
Block (DMI type 1) and the Chassis Information Block (DMI type 3) in
the SMBIOS structure.

All you need is an SMBIOS decoder for COMBOOT.  Maybe somebody could
port dmidecode (http://www.nongnu.org/dmidecode/).  Actually, this
might make a really cool COMBOOT example :-).

 - Pat
   http://unattended.sourceforge.net/