autodiscover does not discover fai-server

[Christian Meyer]

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