[Gllug] Fedora - Large installation Help

[John Hearns]

On Tue, 2005-07-19 at 08:06 +0100, wendy carr wrote:
> Hi there
> 
> I am going to install fedora core 3 on 200 desktops. I
> am planning to create build server with Fedora CD's
> and create kickstart file for automation.
> My problem is that assigning ip address to desktops,
> do i have to change ip address manually in kickstart
> file for all 200 desktops ? or is there any other way
> to do this ? 
> 
> I appriciate you help very much. Any other resources
> on web , please let me know.
Errr... why not use dhcp?

What you are asking is I think 
"If I don't want to use dhcp, how can I set static addresses"

I would do it this way - use dhcp to set the IPs at install time.
In the postinstall script, take either the hostname or the IP of eth0,
and create the correct /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/eth0 file.

You've hit a nail on the head though.
How do you gather MAC addresses for 200 machines when they all arrive
out of the box?
You might be lucky and they are on a label on the back (hah!)

Power them up one by one, and note the MAC which appears in the messages
file when you run dhcp (*)
You could use arpwatch for this also.
Create a dhcpd.conf file.
Choose a SIMPLE naming scheme for the PCs.   pc01 pc02   or desktop01
desktop02
You want a name which is composed of a root plus an increasing number.
You want to be able to script this. Believe me, you do.
Yes, you could have a set of names with anything in, and parse the
dhcpd.conf (or hosts file, or LDAP, or DNS tables...)


Another technique, which I have read about but never applied in anger,
it to do your cabling carefully and make a query to the switch as to
which MAC address is registered at each port. 



(*) On big Sun installs, we use the ILO service processor.
Fire up the SP first, one by one. We have scripts which set up the SP
(ie. set up a user on it, install ssh keys).
You can read out the two MAC addresses of the motherboard from the SP,
which we then put into the dhcpd.conf 



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