Fog, WDS and dnsmasq. Anyway to get them working together?
-
Hello,
We currently run a DHCP server that has WDS already and working, we can deploy off of WDS.
However, we cannot modify the DHCp server in any way sadly due to restrictions, we cannot turn off WDS. I have setup Fog on a test laptop with Kubuntu and am using dnsmasq to try and route it so that we can PXE boot using fog. Sadly it only allows us to boot into WDS and gives none of the options for fog so I potentially have dnsmasq setup incorrectly or perhaps my fog setup is incorrect.
I have followed the wiki guide for dnsmasq and it looks fine but it seems as if the fog server is not sending out the DHCP request.
Any help or advice would be appreciated.
-
The problem you have with wds is that it also supplies proxydhcp values too and the target computer only sees that. You need to isolate target computers from seeing the wds dhcp server. How much flexibility do you have in your environment? Can you adjust your wds server. I seem to remember someone creating a menu item in WDS to chain load FOG PXE.
The other thing you can do is create a deployment network where only the target computers and the fog server exist. FOG would then supply dhcp information on your imaging subnet. In this setup if your FOG server had 2 network interfaces the fog server could also act as a router between your imaging network and your business network. Its not the ideal situation but if you have an environment where you can’t stop WDS you need a way to isolate the broadcast domains between WDS and FOG.
The last way you could do, is USB boot into the FOS engine (the customized linux OS that captures and deploys images). This route doesn’t use pxe booting at all so there won’t be a conflict between pxe booting environment. This solution is intended for testing and not production environments because it more manual of a process than what FOG was designed for.
-
@george1421
We have very little flexibility with what we can do in terms of the DHCP server and WDS, as they lie on a server we have almost no access to and have been informed that we are unable to move these services to another server.The chainbooting idea seems like the best way to go about it. I looked into earlier on however, the only up to date stuff seemed to be for the legacy fog deployment and am not sure how to get it to go with the latest software as well as dnsmasq. if you have any advice in relation to setting it up in a chainboot method that would be fantastic.
Thanks for your time.
-
@kojote13678 I fear if you have very little control of your environment then you have little chance of integrating FOG into your network. There are articles on having a coexistence between SCCM/WDS and Linux PXE environments (as fog would be one). There is an old document here that discusses it: http://www.vcritical.com/2011/06/peaceful-coexistence-wds-and-linux-pxe-servers/ The old instructions are still relevent. The only differences is the pxe boot loader now is undionly.kpxe for bios systems and ipxe.efi for uefi systems. The pxelinux.0 file is NOT used with the new version of FOG.
I feel your only solution here is an isolated network design.
-
@george1421
Thanks george, hopefully we will begin to implement the pxechain method and actually get this system off the ground.Appreciate your help.
