LAN issues for CCPC operation

The Creditcard PCs are diskless. They boot using etherboot and mount their root filesystem using NFS. In a lab-setup you will typically want to connect it to the general purpose LAN so that you can connect then normally to it via telnet or ssh.

Using NFS means that you can not use true dynamic addresses. Rather you must ask your LAN administrator to assign you a fixed IP address. The IP address will be assigned using dhcp.

Etherboot will send a dhcp request to ask for a IP address. It will identify itself by it's Ethernet address - this is the address you find on the bottom of the device.

Your LAN adminitstrator will ask you for the following information

  1. Hardware or Etherent address
  2. Filename for the boot image (this is the name of the file stored in tftpboot. kernel-2.x.y-ccpc.nbi. This is the parameter for the "filename" option in dhcp.conf
  3. Path to the root filesystem. This is where the credit card PC can find it's root filesystem afterwards. This is the name of your server + a colon : and the value of $CCPCROOT.
Here is an example of a dhcpd.conf which works at CERN.
This page last updated 22-07-2004
Comments & questions to Niko Neufeld