Investigate how to use ipmitool to permanently set the boot order to PXE then hard disk about stacki

[gregorybruno]

Set PXE boot on next boot on every boot -- opposite of 'rocks-boot'.

Have ability to turn it off (with an attribute).

[gregorybruno]

Can force a node to PXE boot once or force PXE first, but no way to set boot order with ipmitool.

[jlkaiser]

This is a command to persist:

ipmitool chassis bootdev pxe options=persistent

doens't change order.

[xakraz]

What does it mean ?

Persist / does not change the order ?

[jlkaiser]

Ipmitool is dependent on the implementation of ipmi within the bmc/bios. Most do not allow you to set the order of the boot devices via ipmi.

Adding "persistent" to the bootdev pxe command, just tells the bmc/bios to make whatever the interface that is set in the bios to pxe, to do it all the time.

It does not change the order. You can only change the order of boot devices from either the BIOS or from a command line tool supplied by the vendor. For Dell this is usually the dtk tool or racadm tools that come with the OMA.

There are a couple things you can do for zero-day machines, i.e. machines that come into the data center and are not configured with the proper boot order which should be pxe, disk. (The proper boot order can be requested when the PO is cut for the machines.)

This only works if IPMI is set-up on the machines already, meaning they have an ip either through dhcp or pre-assigned in the bios.

But you can:

1. send the ipmitool command to the node to set pxe as the next boot.
2. In a cart, run the vendor command line tool to set the proper boot order.

We have some other ideas about how to start up a cluster from a vendor supplied set of machines that have default BIOS settings, which are rarely set-up for use in a cluster. But they need testing.