I am trying to setup a series of vmware esx 3i systems to be provisioned by pxe. Since you can pass the extracted config to the hypervisor in the pxe append line as a file on the tftp server, I presume I can use my CentOS DHCP/PXE server to hand out assigned ip's to specific hosts. Thus, I need a way to force each host to load a specific menu choice (with its own config) when starting. So instead of leaving it to default routines which can change or may be unpredictable, how does one force the mappings of menu assignments when clients connect or at least set it in a reliable manner I can document? Thanks! jlc
>So instead of leaving it to default routines which can change or may be unpredictable, >how does one force the mappings of menu assignments when clients connect or at least >set it in a reliable manner I can document?Sorry guys, jumped the gun on this one, http://syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php shows exactly how to make this repeatable. I presume that should not change... Thanks! jlc
Joseph L. Casale wrote:> So instead of leaving it to default routines which can change or may be > unpredictable, > how does one force the mappings of menu assignments when clients connect or > at least > set it in a reliable manner I can document?By MAC address, pxeboot by default will look for config files that are named after the mac address of the system that is booting, if it doesn't find one it falls back to defaults. I haven't tried esx 3i myself yet, but kickstarting ESX 3 was similar to red hat kickstart with anaconda and stuff, I did all my configuration by hand afterwards because of the trunked/tagged network ports which aren't compatible with PXE, and I surely didn't want to risk an automated install to run with multiple LUNs exposed from the SAN to the system! nate