Chris Bell wrote:
On Wed 18 Apr, Michael S. Peek wrote:If I set up a DHCP server using IPCop, is there a way to I tell the Debian installer to listen to my DHCP server instead of the broken Windows DHCP server? If I can figure that out then I can boot and install over the network, without the need for installation media at all.MichaelI do not entirely understand the difficulties you are battling, but any DHCP client will attempt to find a server. IPCop will serve that purpose.
Sorry, I don't think I've done a good job of explaining my problem.The organization where I work, a college campus, has a DHCP server that will assign all unknown hosts a 10.x.x.x address and route all traffic from a 10.x.x.x address to their machine registration page. This is a convenience for students and faculty, who may bring in their new computers from home, register their machines with networking services, and then get straight to work. (the trick is that if you have a 10.x.x.x address then you're not allowed to see anything other than the registration server, and only after you register will the DHCP server assign you a 'real' address.)
But for me, this 'convenience' is a pain. Because all of my hosts use NIS+NFS+Automount, none of our hosts use DHCP, and therefore none of our hosts are registered with the DHCP server. This means that whenever I go to install a host, for which I have a static IP, d-i + DHCP will fail every time. (It'll wind up getting a 10.x.x.x address and can't contact anything on the network other than the registration server.) I have no access to the DHCP server, so I can't change the way it works, or instruct it to serve my hosts their rightful static IP addresses.
If I attempt to set up my own DHCP server then I run into a race condition between my DHCP server and the campus DHCP server. There's no way to tell d-i which server to contact, so it'll listen to the first one that it hears back from.
So as near as I can tell, there is just no way to make this work. Thanks for your help though, Michael