autodiscover does not discover fai-server

[Dr. Matthias Schöpfer]

Hi Christian & Thomas,

thanks for the support and the information. I was finally able to
archive my goal (having a dhcp client install from a fixed IP / DNS
faiserver without PXEBOOT or touching dhcp). @Christian: I do not have
any administrative rights in the Windows Domain, and since the
Administrators are not very cooperative regarding linux (Security Risk,
lol), I will probably never be able to implement your solution.

For whom it may interest, this is the menuentry in
/etc/fai/grub.cfg.autodiscover that did the job:

menuentry "EXPRESS WAY TO DEBIAN" {
    set gfxpayload=$resolution
    linux   /boot/vmlinuz FAI_FLAGS="menu,verbose,createvt"
FAI_CONFIG_SRC=nfs:\
//<Your ServerIP here>/srv/fai/config root=/dev/nfs rw nfsroot=<Your
ServerIP here>:/srv/fai/nfsroot,nfsvers=3,nolock aufs rootovl
    initrd  /boot/initrd.img
}

Regards,

    Matthias



i.A. Dr.-Ing. Matthias  Schöpfer  | ithinx GmbH |  Software Engineer
Phone:  +49 (221) 99589-332 | Fax: +49 (221) 99 589-199  | E-Mail:  Matthias.Schoepfer at ithinx.io


On 06/25/2017 11:55 AM, Christian Meyer wrote:
> Hello Matthias,
>
> Am Dienstag, den 20.06.2017, 12:25 +0000 schrieb Dr. Matthias Schöpfer:
>
>> company uses Windows
> I'm using FAI in an Windows AD Network (with Windows Server 2008R2),
> too.
>
>> I will not be able to use DHCP / PXE.
> When you have admin rights on your Windows DC yo CAN use PXE (see below)
>
> I'm not familiar with autodiscover (because I don't need it and I'm not
> using it), ...
>
>> is there any other way to for example pass the IP via boot variable
> ... but as you asked for other ways to get it working, here is my
> solution:
>
> a) When booting from CD / USB-Pendrive I modified /etc/fai/grub.cfg
> (before building 'my own' minimal CD, 387 MB):
>
> menuentry "FAI installation, booting from USB, config from FAIserver" {
>     set gfxpayload=$resolution
>     linux   /boot/vmlinuz boot=live FAI_FLAGS="reboot"
> FAI_ACTION=install FAI_CONFIG_SRC=nfs://faiserver/srv/fai/config quiet
>     initrd  /boot/initrd.img
> }
>
> Please note that DNS name resolution for the FAI server may cause
> problems when your FAI server is not member of the windows domain. In
> this case you can use your FAI servers (static) IP adress.
>
> b) Since I found it not very comfortable to boot every Linux machine
> with an USB-stick, I'm also using PXE-Boot from Windows Server with
> pxelinux. I only need the CD/USB-ISO for my initial faiserver.
>
> So (for security reasons) I can disable USB/CD-boot in all BIOS
> settings, too.
>
> Windows PXE can not boot Linux, but (with admin rights) you (easily) can
> replace it by with PXE-Linux, which provides a small extra PXE-Bootmenu
> to Windows Server. Here you can choose to continue normal Windows
> PXE-Boot (default for me after 10 seconds) or to boot Linux (in my case
> FAI using actual config from stretch FAIserver without autodiscover).
>
> http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=PXELINUX#Deploy_Linux_from_Windows_WDS.2FRIS_server_using_PXELinux
>
> When you are interested in my PXELINUX-config (and the few neccessary
> steps on Windows server), please let me know.
>
> Christian Meyer
>
>
>