[Solved] Porteus as PXE server - issues

[pet.klikera]

Hello all,
I have been using Porteus 1.2 to erase disks on multiple machines via PXE boot and a little self made script that calls shred on all HDDs. Porteus bootable USB stick was modified and a random machine is booted as a PXE server. The machines that need to be wiped are then booted off the network and the script is autorun. All nice and automatic...

In 2.1 and 3.0RC I'm unfortunately not able to do it any more because of two reasons:
1. The PXE server does not start correctly - since the eth0 iface does not have an IP address at boot time, the pxe-server script fails to start a working dnsmasq and nfs exports. The error(s) being:

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dnsmasq: bad command line options: bad dhcp-range
exportfs: Invalid IP address .1/24
exportfs: Invalid IP address .1/24

Actually I got this working by modifying the /opt/porteus-scripts/pxe-server script itself to assign a random IP address if none was found.

2. No /dev entries for HDDs on PXE clients - and that is a fatal issue for me, because I was unable to find a way to get it working

All modifications on the USB stick were made via xzm file(s).

It's not a pressing issue yet, because everything works with 1.2 still, but I'm afraid that newer network cards and/or HDD controlers are not going to be supported on the old Porteus 1.2 kernel (i guess it's 3.4.9) any more...

Greets,
PK

[fanthom]

I got this working by modifying the /opt/porteus-scripts/pxe-server script itself to assign a random IP address if none was found.

please share your tweak to i'll merge it with pxe-server script

No /dev entries for HDDs on PXE clients

please boot porteus-1.2 and show me output of 'lspci -knn' command so i can track which drivers are missing in never kernels
thanks

[pet.klikera]

please share your tweak to i'll merge it with pxe-server script

I used the wisdom from porteus-1.1 pxe-boot script:
from the line 66 onwards, the script should be (I quoted the existing parts of the script just for reference)

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...
# Find IP address. If more interfaces are available, use the first one:
IP=`ifconfig | grep broadcast | head -n1 | awk '{print$2}'`

# ----tweak start----
# if no IP is defined, set a random one
if [ "$IP" = "" ]; then
   #NetworkManager needs to be stopped, because it messes up the iface when the network status changes
   /etc/rc.d/rc.networkmanager stop
   IP="10."$(($RANDOM/130+1))"."$(($RANDOM/130+1))".1"
   echo "Setting the IP address of iface "$(ls -1 /sys/class/net | head -n 1 | sed "s|@||g")" to "$IP
   ifconfig $(ls -1 /sys/class/net | head -n 1 | sed "s|@||g") $IP netmask 255.0.0.0 up
fi
# ----tweak end----

# Calculate C class range:
RANGE=`echo $IP | cut -d"." -f1-3`
...

please boot porteus-1.2 and show me output of 'lspci -knn' command so i can track which drivers are missing in never kernels
thanks

I'm sorry for the wrong information, I'm using porteus-1.1, not 1.2! Anyway, this part has solved itself after a fresh porteus-2.1 USB stick was made... I guess I tweaked the old one too much.

If you need more info, just holler!

Greets,
PK

[fanthom]

this is merged now:

Code: Select all

- pxe-server: added support for random private IP when nothing is defined

thanks