3 State Boot Support¶

• Table of contents
• 3 State Boot Support
  • The old way
  • The new way
  • How it works
  • Defaults to 'off'
  • How to use it
  • Caveats

Foreman 1.1 now supports a 3 state boot model. This document describes the behaviour of the system, and how to make use of it.

The old way¶

Until now Foreman has only ever cared about 2 states. A machine is either:

• Known to Foreman and in Build mode
  - A MAC-specific PXE file is written to launch the installer
• Known to Foreman and not in Build mode, or unknown to Foreman
  - The global default PXE file instructs the machine to localboot

This makes it impossible to handle unknown machines separately from known, built machines.

The new way¶

We now separate the last two states:

• Known to Foreman and in Build mode
  - A MAC-specific PXE file is written to launch the installer
• Known to Foreman and not in Build mode
  - A MAC-specific PXE file is written to instruct localboot
• Unknown to Foreman
  - The global default PXE file instructs the machine to whatever

How it works¶

Until now, we've relied on a single, global default template (PXE Default File) which is written to all the proxies via the button on the Provisioning Template page.

We now add a new global template (PXE Localboot Default). This does not need to be deployed to all the proxies, as it will be written when a host exits Build mode. So our state+file list becomes:

• Known to Foreman and in Build mode
  - A MAC-specific PXE file is written (OS-specific installer template)
• Known to Foreman and not in Build mode
  - A MAC-specific PXE file is written (Global PXE Localboot template)
• Unknown to Foreman
  - The global default PXE file is used (PXE Default File template)

Defaults to 'off'¶

Actually, this feature is always on. However, by default, the two global templates contain the same PXE instructions (i.e. boot from local disk). Thus, the current behaviour of Foreman is preserved - if a machine is unknown or not in build mode, it will get a template that instructs it to boot from local disk.

How to use it¶

Suppose you want all unknown hardware to boot into a custom ramdisk image that you have added to the TFTP server. To do this simply, edit the PXE Default File template to represent your desired behaviour. For example:

DEFAULT menu
PROMPT 0
MENU TITLE PXE Menu
TIMEOUT 200
TOTALTIMEOUT 6000
ONTIMEOUT isoboot

LABEL isoboot
LINUX boot/memdisk
INITRD boot/foreman.iso
APPEND iso raw

Then click Build PXE Default to redeploy the Global template.

Caveats¶

Currently the system will deploy the global template to all TFTP proxies. That may cause unintended behaviour if you want to boot-to-ramdisk only on a single network.

One workaround would be to manually fix the default file for the appropriate subnet after deploying the template.