[BBLISA] MBR that reboots machine

[Dean Anderson]

Well, there are two timeouts to contend with: 

the first is waiting for the pxe/dhcp server. This can't be fixed directly, but the MBR trick will work. Well, It will if you have an MBR and aren't building a new machine.

The second is the tftpserver. This is more commonly the problem. And I fixed this at BofA by increasing the timeout in the PXE boot loader.  We didn't see this issue except with building systems where the build server is out of country or quite distant network-wise and latency or packet loss could be an issue.  [and if this sounds like a clstrfk, it was, but there are banking rules for in-country compute/border controls and we don't want in-country build infrastructure.]

  --Dean

Sent from my iPhone

> On Oct 7, 2016, at 2:23 PM, Aaron Macks <upelluri at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Is is possible to increase the PXE timeout in the NIC BIOS?  Set the timeout long enough and it'll keep asking for the PXE kernel until the server has come online.  I know this means a bios change to every machine manually, but at least there's no maintenance
> 
> A
> 
> -------------
> Aaron Macks(aaronm at wiglaf.org)
> http://www.wiglaf.org/~aaronm/
> My sheep has seven gall bladders, that makes me the King of the Universe!
> 
>> On Fri, Oct 7, 2016 at 2:20 PM, Paul Beltrani <spamgrinder at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Personally, I'd go with the thumb drive solution.  They're cheap in bulk and it's a simple fix.  However, that doesn't answer your question.
>> 
>> Re rebooting directly from MBR
>> I can't think of anything that runs completely out of the MBR.  (Perhaps the original version of GRUB?  It's been too long and I don't recall.)   While GRUB2 looks for configs/menus in a boot partition, it is FOSS and you may be able to modify it to simply do a system reset.  See https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
>> 
>>   -- Paul Beltrani
>> 
>> 
>>> On Fri, Oct 7, 2016 at 11:46 AM, Alex Aminoff <alex at basespace.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On 10/7/2016 11:02 AM, Dan Ritter wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Can you install a tiny boot partition containing etherboot/gpxe
>>>> (http://etherboot.org/wiki/howtos) which will then try to PXE
>>>> boot indefinitely? It fits on a floppy or tiny USB, too.
>>>> 
>>> That would be a backup plan if we can not find something that fits in just the MBR. The local HDs already have partitions on them, they could be re-partitioned to create space for a small partition as you suggest, but that would be a hassle. We have also thought of using a USB stick, but those are unreliable and we would have to buy and configure 20-30 USB sticks.
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> Can you alter the BIOS config to not boot off local disk?
>>> 
>>> Unfortunately the BIOS does not re-try booting from the beginning after trying all the options in the boot order. It gives you a screen that says something like "no OS found, press any key to reboot".
>>> 
>>> 
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