Tag: TFTP

PXEBoot the VMware ESXi installer

Christian Leave a comment

Some of you may know, that VMware released vSphere 4.0 Update 1 yesterday. I took this as a reason, to finally wrap my head around booting the VMware ESXi installer from my PXE/TFTP box. Since VMware was kind enough to provide (a somewhat worthless) document, that explains how to extract the necessary files on Windows. But that quite doesn’t work with Linux — and VMware just states that you should be using mount and it’s option offset.

Luckily there are smart people around. Cameron shows exactly as to how you’d mount the dd-image. If the dd-image is mounted, you just need to copy over cim.vgz, license.tgz, oem.tgz, sys.vgz, vmk.gz and vmkboot.gz. After doing so, you should add a section to your pxelinux.cfg that kinda looks like this:

Just make sure, everything following APPEND and before IAPPEND is in a single line.

Dell PowerEdge 1855, DRAC/MC, firmware updates, telnet and csr’s

Christian Leave a comment

Today I played a bit with our PE Chassis, or more specifically the DRAC/MC (remote management console). One of the things I’ve been experiencing was that the DRAC/MC was rather slow when browsing on the web interface (as in waiting a minute for the jnlp for the KVM to download). So I went ahead, fired up net-misc/atftp on my notebook, put the firmware update provided by Dell in the TFTPROOT and executed this in my telnet session on the DRAC/MC:

You may ask now, wtf does he use telnet for on that box ? It’s as simple as Dell isn’t providing anything else to use, the switches come w/ ssh, but not the management console. Only way to get ssh is to buy a new one, which is like 500 EUR.

Waited a few minutes impatiently for the DRAC/MC to come back up (and it finally came back up). The good thing is, the DRAC/MC is now at least a bit faster (at least I feel its a bit faster) and we’re up at mgmt-1.4.2.

Now, since we are a member of the DFN CA, we are able to generate signed certificates (at least Internet Explorer recognizes it through the DTAG Root certificate – which Mozilla products sadly don’t have by default). For that I need a 2048 bit PCKS#10 (or CSR), which I tried to squash out of the DRAC/MC. But what the hell ❓

The DRAC/MC only gives me a 1024 bit one without the possibility to choose what kind of CSR I want to generate … 😡