Hi,
For the last couple of days I’ve been trying to setup a device in our lab for deployment and installation of a Linux OS. However, I’ve came across a few issues and lots of questions and hopefully I can get some answers here.
Considerations:
1. I’ve decided to give it a go with LAVA v2 and try using the pipeline model 2. I’m not testing any “boards”, so it’s hard to find a similar example 3. I am not deploying any Linaro images (not even debian based) 4. My team develops and supports a reference Linux OS, based on RHEL, so that means we have total control of our images, kickstarter scripts, etc. 5. We already have a PXE server in our network, which is where our servers (the targets in this context) get booted from by default 6. Once booted from PXE, we get a PXE menu, where we can either select an option, or press ESC and add a custom command (at this syslinux is running) 7. We have access to the serial console of every device via serial port server (telnet <ipaddr> <port>) 8. We have power control over every device via IPMI
Issues:
1. I couldn’t find the documentation for how to add devices and device types to the server (which location to add the file, which format - yaml/conf) 2. In the above described environment, I suppose we would skip the deployment phase, since the devices already boot into syslinux from PXE (is this correct?). Either way, it would be nice to be able to run ‘ipmitool chassis booted pxe’ before rebooting the system. 3. Either way (via boot or deploy), how can I make sure to detect the PXE (syslinux) menu, send the ESC key, and send the command I need to trigger the kickstart installation?
To sum-up, the Workflow I’m trying to achieve after having completed the whole setup sort of goes like this:
1. Reboot target device into PXE (the PXE itself will download and start syslinux here) 2. Wait for PXE menu (expect some sort of string) 3. Send ESC key (to get into the boot shell) 4. Send command (this will trigger our kickstarter script and the installation will take around 5 minutes). The images that are needed are fetched automatically from our sftp server. 5. Wait for boot prompt after system installation succeeds 6. Login using credentials (username, password) 7. Run whatever tests we need from here
Any help here would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance! -- matallui