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h

hallowed-zebra-34071

03/28/2023, 4:05 AM
trying to get harvester on a node that will pxe boot 100% of the time (or can lay down a disk image). I don't think harvester supports this deployment method right now the system is in a reboot/install loop, re-installing constantly...
c

chilly-soccer-69887

03/28/2023, 4:16 AM
harvester can use pxe boot for sure, can you provide more specific detail about your environment?
h

hallowed-zebra-34071

03/28/2023, 4:35 AM
sure, I have the node installing from pxe just fine. my problem is that after install the node will reboot (as is normal) and then pxe boot to the installer again (and again)
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my env is a openstack-ironic deploy, it's expecting to either always pxe boot or to pxe boot once and lay down an image to disk (raw disk image or qcow2)
having harvester pxe boot to it's own installer is kinda out of scope
I think the two products / tech just do not work well together 😞 I'd like to use ironic to manage nodes DC wide if I can
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chilly-soccer-69887

03/28/2023, 6:19 AM
can you check this node's boot order? maybe network card has overrided hard drive?
h

hallowed-zebra-34071

03/28/2023, 2:16 PM
network card does take priority, I was trying to get the node booted without manual intervention (selecting pxe boot from bios)
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chilly-soccer-69887

03/29/2023, 12:47 AM
the boot order should change once the installation finished, which version are you installing?
I'm not very familiar with openstack though, when using seeder, which is a tool that automatically manages and provisions harvester cluster on baremetal machines, it will serve PXE boot only once, after harvester installed the nic will not boot up since the PXE server stopped serving them
Maybe you can check out how openstack-ironic manages PXE server🤔 they should not boot up with nic again if you finished installation
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hallowed-zebra-34071

03/29/2023, 1:08 AM
there are two ways that openstack ironic boots servers. One is direct, where it will boot the 'ironic python agent (installer) and write a disk image to disk, it'll do this just once then boot from disk. I don't think this fit's harvesters model til that pull request I linked is available (provides disk images). The other is ramdisk, this method always boots the pxe image, this half fits harvesters model. but since it's always boots the pxe image it'll constantly reinstall.
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r

red-king-19196

04/10/2023, 4:03 PM
Just came across this thread … If I recall correctly, Ironic will use something like
ipmitool chassis bootdev pxe
to set the one-time boot device for the target machine. The boot order in BIOS is better to keep the “hard drive” above “nic” so that after the installation is completed, the machine can boot from the disk without intervention. Regarding the first way for ironic to boot servers, Harvester installation will have an “install mode” in the upcoming release. It basically streams the image and writes it to the disk. Seems a perfect fit.
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hallowed-zebra-34071

04/10/2023, 4:24 PM
ya, I'm watching that pull request, can't wait to have a qcow2 file to install instead
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