On Dec 9, 2008, at 12:49 PM, Ron Johnson wrote:
Yes, theoretically that is what I want, but if I'm not mistaken PXE boot is dependent on a dhcp server giving the machine an IP and declaring that it hasa boot image to provide, or am I wrong.I want to give the ip as an option and use a given nfs server as a root, notresolve these values at run timeHmmm, yes, you're right. There's got to be a way, though, using bootp, MAC address and tftp, since that's how we did it 10 years ago with X Terminals.
Setting up a DHCP server that does exactly what your bootp server did 10 years ago is not that hard.
DHCP doesn't *have* to assign IP addresses from a dynamic pool. It can have fixed IP addresses for each of the MAC addresses you want to serve, and refuse to supply anything for unknown MACs.
Total time to install the DHCP server software, read the documentation, and configure the setup should be no more than a few hours. At least, that's how long it took me to do an equivalent setup for my home network.
Rick