reserved dhcp address required for pxe boot

[Mark Stoner_1]

We have just installed RDP 2.00 and the pxe clients will not load the whole tcp stack without having a reserved dhcp address.

pxe identifies an initial deployment and halts at.
Change computer name to xyz
Initializing tcp/ip using DHCP

Anyone come across this?

Thanks

[Daniel Harjanto]

Yes, we do have same problems with HP BladeServers.

DHCP allocated address will rapidly consume by this blade, so we switch to static IP on the enclosure approach to make sure that each blade has one IP assign to it.

Regards,

[Craig Jackson_3]

I think you're describing two phenomena, one of which Altiris can affect only with difficulty, and the other which is up to you.

Here's what I see in the way of DHCP address consumption:

- The PXE driver gets an IP address from DHCP. As best as I can tell, this is done by MAC address only.

- The Altiris Bootworks stuff loads a DOS environment including the Microsoft DOS TCP/IP stack. Since this has replaced the PXE environment, it needs to request an IP address separately. This time, it offers a UUID. Because of this, the ISI DHCP server gives it a separate IP address, if it's being allocated out of a pool. This is required behavior in the DHCP RFC. (I believe that there's an option in ISI DHCP to change this behavior.)

I've noticed that if you give ISI DHCP a static IP correspondence using the "fixed-address" syntax, then it gives the same IP to both requests.

- Bootworks runs, and loads Windows. Using the default unattend.txt file, Windows goes out and requests a DHCP address on each of the 4 NICs. I think the first one is the same one that was used by Bootworks, because it uses the same UUID.

Of course, the ILO needs an IP address of its own, which by default comes from DHCP.

I've reduced this consumption by:

- Giving a fixed IP address to the blade before building it, using the ISI "fixed-address" syntax. (I think the Windows DHCP server calls this a static reservation.)

- Turning off the switch port for the NICs not being used during the build process.

There's also a program in the HP stuff which will allow you to disable the NIC completely. (It turns out that this isn't something easy to do in Windows; the only Microsoft tool to do it is in the Device Driver Development Kit (DDK).)

Craig

[Mark Stoner_1]

assigning reservations in the dhcp pool is not a satisfactory resolution. This is likely to casue an excessive amount of needless manual intervention or prior configuration. I dont need to do this when trying to roll out 40 + scripted installs concurrently.

This behavior has only become apparent since installing v 2.0. When previously running on V1.6 there wer no issues with dhcp and reservations.

Mark