Hello,
I am setting up a kickstart installation on an IBM blade server with RHEL 4 update 2. There is a management server with a web interface that allows me to restart blades, etc. The management server is also the DHCP server and they are all on 192 addresses. The repository is on the management server and there is a /tftpboot directory.
I am still having trouble with the services somewhere. When it boots up to (blade 1 for example), I get messages saying that it is looking for DHCP....then an ARP timeout. It does display the MAC address so the client and server do connect. I am pretty sure the PXE part is set up right as well.
I am not sure how to make ARP and/or TFTP not time out. Is TFTP too wimpy to use for this? Should I be using ftp or http instead? I have tried via http and also via ftp and both times they have failed because I don't quite get it to find the right information.
Someone else set up the NFS mount and suppossedly that is working. I have tried starting and stopping various services when it connects, since it fails consistently anyway. I don't know a lick about NFS, so I don't know how to check it or anything. I didn't change anything to do with NFS so it should still be working.
Apparrently the system is set to use a /var/www/html/blade.cfg file rather than a ks.cfg file. I am very sure the file entries are ok, since I have looked at it a thousand times.
1. I am not too familiar with arp; basically I know that there is arp and reverse arp and one of them has to do with getting ip addresses from known hostnames and the other deals with the oppossite. I have seen the arp -a command but I am not really sure what that does.
2. When I go into the GNOME desktop under something like System Tools -> whatever -> 'Network Boot', and I click on a blade (1 for example) - I get a box that is pointing to the (correct) ip address/blade.cfg. Before you tell me to change it to /var/www/html/blade.cfg, I can tell you that the installs die regardless of what is in that gui box. Hence the suspicion of some sort of network services interfering.
3. Can anyone just tell me any services that I absolutely MUST have running and of course any that are definitely a problem? That alone would be a great place to continue from.
Thanks in advance
Marc
