Looking for a bootp server which does not need a hardware-address
As far as I can make out when you set up dhcp3 to act as a bootp server you
need to put in the hardware address of the box that you are going to provide
the info to, and this gets echoed back to the requesting device (see below).
If I am initialising a whole bunch of embedded systems (and I only need to do
them a few times, then they are out in the fields and I never re-initialise
them), having to put the MAC address in each time is an error prone fiddle.
So I would like to set things up so that I have an ethernet card dedicated to
servicing such requests and then have the server respond to whatever
MAC address gets sent and initiate the TFTP transfer.
If I simply say:-
subnet 192.168.254.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 192.168.254.100 192.168.254.200;
filename "vmlinus";
server-name "192.168.254.254";
}
the boxes fail saying that the MAC address was not handled. I guess that
when dhcpd sends back the response when a specific hardware address is
specified it includes the MAC address from the request, but not for a simple
subnet.
Otherwise I have to put in :-
host board {
hardware ethernet 0:0c:42:04:02:62;
fixed-address 192.168.254.1;
filename "vmlinus";
server-name "192.168.254.254";
}
and that works.
Now you may recognise this MAC address as being a Microtik address, and
yes this is a Routerboard I am using.
Microtik provide a utility (for Windows) which is a combined DHCPD server and
TFTP server, it sees the device and allows the user to select and send a
kernel image to the machine. It does not seem to want to work under
WINE, and anyway I would rather a native utility.
I guess this must have come up before, but probably due to me asking the
wrong question, Google has not provided an answer.
Any help gratefully received. I realise this is not strictly a Debian problem
but I could not think of a better list to ask and I would end up running the
solution on a Debian box.
Regards
David
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