dhcpclient on diskless installation system

[Volker Epting]

Hi,

I have problems during the installation process with my diskless fai
system. dhcp lease time ends after 30 minutes (15 minutes lease time + 
grace period) and some clients are too slow to end installation in this 
time. So our dhcp-dns server deletes the host from dns service, in which 
case the communication between the nfsroot-server and the installation 
client fails and the installation system freezes.

Increasing the dhcp lease time is not an option.

So I guess I need a working dhcpclient on the diskless installation 
system that renews the dhcp lease.

After a short discussion with mrfai (thanks a lot) I modified the 
nfsroot so that the initially called dhcpclient is not killed and can 
now renew the lease. For this I modified 
$NFSROOT/usr/lib/fai/get-boot-info at stanza get_dhcp_info. I commented 
out the "killall dhclient".

Unfortunately that does not solve my problem at all. The dhclient works 
and in some cases the installation works without any problems, whereas 
in some cases the computer simply freezes.

This is absolutely sporadic: the test machine fails to install three 
times consecutively, whereas at another time installation runs smoothly. 
I'm on the wire with our fluke box and I do not see any errors on the 
network. Also the installation server doesn't show me any errors.

I configured the syslog to log to the clients' console on the client, 
and still: no errors. not funny, but real.

I think of changing our concept to install only a minimal system on the 
client, reboot and continue the installation with fai software update 
service. What do you think about that?

Thanks for help
best reguards,
Volker Epting

-- 
Dipl. Informatiker (FH) Volker Epting
Commercial and technical Services
Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE
Heidenhofstrasse 2, 79110 Freiburg, Germany
Phone: +49-761-4588-5430 Fax: +49-761-4588-9430
volker.epting at ise.fraunhofer.de
http://www.ise.fhg.de
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