Re: [Freeipmi-devel] Re: How can we get MAC address during node

[Anand Babu]

,----[ address@hidden ]
| BUILD.  bmc-lan-set runs under linux on a system that has already been
| installed.  And you can't install the system (at least not with a
| network-based install tool) until you have the MAC address.  It is
| really a chicken-before-the-egg problem.
| 
| MAC address to the console then exits.  We then harvest these
| addresses from our console log files.  This requires a way to kick off
| the install (network based or CD drive in each node) and console
| server (eg Cyclades) infrastructure.  2) we hook all the nodes to a
| Cisco switch then harvest them from the arp table on the Cisco switch.
| 
| I think there are a few other tricks like this.  I can check.  But
| none of these I would consider very easy to do on the factory floor.
| It seems to me as a motherboard vendor, Intel could easily solve this
| problem by having the MAC address of the on-board NIC etched on the
| motherboard (or put on a sticker) during manufacturing or modify the
| BIOS to print the MAC address to the screen during a very early part
| of the system POST.
`----

Thanks for clarifying.

The way we do at CDC is - Any system on the build-subnet booting over
a network, will obtain a remote bootstrap image to pre-configure the
system and continue with the installation. We usually take care of
labelling the system with MAC address, IPMI pre-configuration. This
approach will not apply for our Thunder needs..

How about this approach?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bootable  LS240/Floppy/USB-thumpdrive/CDROM/DVD/Swappable-HDD Media
with Linux kernel, initrd (bmc-config, bios-config... tools).

Once linuxrc gets control, we can collect the system information (MAC
addr, current LAN/EMP settings, BIOS/BMC version info) necessary to
boot-strap the system.

Then it is just a matter of policy, whether to assume input from a
config file, report and query from a management node or prompt on the
console. 
------------------------------------------------------------------------


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