Custom PXE per machine ?

[develroo]

So I have a mixed network of machines, some work with the unionly.kpxe but some machine with Realtek cards only work with the realtek.kpxe. The trouble is it is a windows server sending out DHCP requests and there seems to be no way to allocate a different PXE per host. So is there a way in which FOG can dynamically make available a pxe image from a generic pxe filename?

Must admit it would seem like a very useful feature to be able to do something like that dynamically from the fog control panel.

Feasible, anyone?

[george1421]

@develroo Check with your hardware (or tell us what it is and we can help you find it) to see if it contains a UUID field? When the PXE rom sends the first dhcp discover packet if it fills out the UUID field in the dhcp discover packet then you might be able to do something.

If that field is populated and unique per hardware model then you can dynamically switch between by either creating profiles in Windows 2012 dhcp or use isc-dhcp or dnsmasq both on your FOG server to make the dynamic changes.

[develroo]

@wayne-workman

This is a TON easier in ISC-DHCP, because you can just write a script to generate the config for a thousand machines and slap that into the config file.

Hehe… yeah the irony is I am moving them to a Linux network but to do that I first need to migrate away their dekstops etc… hence fog. Oh well catch 22 I guess but I will look closer at the PXE differences anyway.

Thanks.

[Wayne Workman]

@develroo said in Custom PXE per machine ?:

it is a windows server sending out DHCP requests and there seems to be no way to allocate a different PXE per host.

You would use DHCP reservations. In your reservation, don’t specify an IP, just specify a boot file.

Your default boot file should be the file that works for most systems. Then, the reservations only need made for the deviations of the same architecture type (i.e. PXEClient:Arch:00000)

Does that make sense?

Also, you might read thorough this to get a better understanding of the things at play in your problem: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=BIOS_and_UEFI_Co-Existence