Test Frontend

Wish to be able to separate production and test use of frontend. The idea is that the normal production frontend can be maintained with a well defined state, while a second frontend is used for developing and testing client configurations.

Basic Method

Two frontends will be installed. On the test frontend, some items will be modified so that clients installed from it will be able to work as if they had been installed from the production frontend. Some items to look at:

• root ssh keys
• 411 certificate (/etc/411-security)
• network services (DNS, 411, NFS)

PXE Booting

ROCKS adds nodes that have MAC addresses in the DB into the dhcpd config. ROCKS doesn't add a default action for unknown MACs to the PXE boot process. So, if a host's MAC is not in the DB on the frontend, that frontend won't respond to DHCP requests from the host.

Will add all nodes that might be used for tests on the test frontend. For all host's on both frontends, will add an attribute ("mac-eth0") to DB that stores the host's MAC. Then will remove or restore the normal MAC value in the DB. This will control which frontend builds a host.

-- TomRockwell - 28 Oct 209