@george1421 said in Passing host variable to iPXE menu:

@sebastian-roth I don’t think this is possible here. I think we have the chicken and egg situation here. dhcp knows about the computer’s name because the client tells it during dhcp negotiations. In this case, the client is a new born and doesn’t know enough to tell the dhcp server its name. To get it to work correctly the OP may have to setup dhcp reservations to inform the dhcp server what the client associated with mac address xxxx is.

Exactly this. We should used to furnish boxes with the hostname through DHCP (using option 012) but it requires manually configuring reservations.

@george1421 said in Passing host variable to iPXE menu:

@dcldn Really the FOG Client for linux should do the same thing, if you image your systems like the windows folks do (create a golden image and then clone from that). Then the fog client will rename the system and install any snapins that you might want. But if you have a working solution run with it until you run into a show stopper. Then realize there are other ways to go about things too.

We currently provision our Linux boxes by bootstrapping with PXE/Kickstart which then hands off to Puppet to do the rest. I like this solution as we’re able to make incremental changes to the workstation estate through Puppet and we know that when we add a new box to the network it will end up with the same state. With that said, I can definitely see the benefits of cloning and it may be something we investigate in the future. We deploy Windows with FOG in the traditional way and it works great, multi-casting for example is a fantastic feature.

@george1421 said in Passing host variable to iPXE menu:

@dcldn said in Passing host variable to iPXE menu:

Your solution worked perfectly, thank you so much, George!

The next time I chat with the developers, I’ll ask about making this a “feature” instead of a “hack”. If it is promoted to a feature it will be in the next release (1.5.0 stable [probably]) They won’t back port solutions normally.

I suspect there are people handing off to a different provisioning solution to handle hostname config etc. for nix hosts. It’s awesome being able to do this through Fog now, particularly in my environment where I have workstations dual booting Windows and Linux.

@george1421

I want to click a host (or group of hosts), click the Basic Tasks menu -> Advanced tasks and choose a “Deploy CentOS” task from there which starts the kickstart installation I’ve configured in the iPXE menu. It already works fine from the iPXE menu itself.

@george1421

Your solution worked perfectly, thank you so much, George!

The next thing I need to look at doing is a new task type so I can kick off this kickstart install through the Fog web-GUI. I’ve installed the Task Type Management plugin but not sure what to enter in the fields. I’ve had a search but can’t find any documentation on this plugin. Would you be able to point me in the right direction? My menu name is “:CentOS_7_4_vm” so I assume that needs to go in one of the fields. Let me know if you would prefer I start a new post.

Thanks again

@george1421

Hi George, thank you for the quick response and looking into this for me, its much appreciated! I’m on Version 1.3.0, I’m hoping that’s close enough for your solution to work. I’ll give it a try hopefully later today.

Hi All

I have a custom Fog iPXE menu entry to launch a CentOS 7 install with a kickstart file.

The parameters section of the entry looks like this:

initrd nfs://nfsserver/path/to/image/x86_64/initrd.img
chain nfs://nfsserver/path/to/image/x86_64/vmlinuz initrd=initrd.img ramdisk_size=32000 dns=dnsserver ksdevice=link ip=::::myhostname::dhcp ks=nfs://nfsserver/path/to/kickstart/centos_7_kickstart.ks
boot || goto MENU

This works great, I can launch from the iPXE menu and the CentOS Anaconda installer starts.

“myhostname” in…

ip=::::myhostname::dhcp

…is the host name that is passed to the CentOS Anaconda installer.

Is there a way to pass the Host Name attribute of a registered FOG host (or any FOG attribute for that matter) to this menu.

I guess I’m wondering if it’s possible to do something like:

ip=::::${foghost}::dhcp

The goal is to be able to launch the installer and have it configure the host name based on what has been configured in Fog. A bonus would be a custom task I can launch from the Fog Web Gui.

There are other ways I can assign a hostname when bootstrapping a host (DHCP “host-name” option, a script in the kickstart script etc.) but I’m interested to know if this is achievable through Fog.

Many thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide.
David.