[TriLUG] Diskless Clients and Security - Followup Questions

[Roy Vestal]

I have a over 150 machines at the moment that will in some way have to 
be booted diskless. Currently, we are using boot CD's but I want to move 
away from the CD's so that the management of the environments is 
centralized and the OS projects are consistant. However, not all of 
these machines are going to be online at one time so I would like to use 
a set of 100 IPs and have them randomly assigned when a machine is 
brought online.  Make sense?

This is a development lab and these machines are used mostly for 
development and/or testing and are not online for long periods of time 
(i.e days/weeks, not necessarily months). We now have 3 different OS/env 
scenarios that we use where PXE would let us minimize maintenance and 
more closely control the versions of the enviroments used. However we 
"share" the network in question (with me being the DHCP/DNS server admin 
<evil grin!> ) so we need to be able to secure it from other groups 
outside our lab. And we are constantly adding new machines and removing 
old machines from dev/testing pool so I want to be able to manage these 
simply. Just adding/removing the mac's will be painful enough.

In a nutshell, I need to overcommit my range by almost 100% to an 
everchanging pool of machines/mac's.


Rick DeNatale wrote:
> On 7/14/06, Roy Vestal <rvestal at trilug.org> wrote:
> 
>> In dhcpd.conf I want to create a range of IP's, say 192.168.1.10 -
>> 192.168.1.50 and I want to tell dhcpd to use these for 50 specific
>> MAC's. However, I do not want to reserve a specific IP for a specific
>> MAC, I want the MAC to be assigned and IP out of the pool, in this
>> example 192.168.1.10 - .50 . How would we go about this?
> 
> 
> That's actually 41, not 50 addresses.
> 
> Just curious, do you have more clients than that, or is there some
> other reason you don't want to fix their ip addresses?
> 
> My philosophy is that, unless you need to overcommit a pool of ip
> addresses, it's better to set it up so that clients get a consistent
> address.
>