Deployment Solution

I have servers with 8 NICs, thay are all connected. but only 1 link has connection to a DHCP server.

Installing with the WinPE images gives no problem.

But the LinuxPE is retrying several times to get a DHCP address on all the other adapters, which makes a big unnecessary delay in the installation process with several reboots.

Is there a way to let the LinuxPE only use DHCP on Eth0 and not try to get a DHCP address on all the other adapters?

You can do PXE binding on DHCP by following steps:-

1) Open DHCP.

2) RightClick on HostName.

3) Select Add\Remove Bindings..

4) Check only the NIC on which binding is required .Click OK and save it.

Hope this helps.

Previous reply is messed up and I can't correct it so here is duplicate reply.

Ishani Bose , thank you for your reply.

But I think you get me wrong, the timeouts are not on the Altiris server which has only one NIC.

The problem is with the servers I want to deploy, they have 8 NICs, 1 NIC in the same subnet as the altiris server which is fine and gets it IP address instantly.

But the other 7 NICs are also connected to several other VLans (without DHCP server) so there is a network link on it and the LinuxPE OS is retrying several times to obtain an IP address on these adapters.

I would need something like changing in the LinuxPE image that it only checks eth0 for an IP and not try to get an IP address on the other network adapters.

If I get you correct, you are interested in saving your time while booting into preboot.

For this you need to perform few tasks.

Let’s say you are booting your machine in preboot named  ‘LinuxTarget-1’

You need to copy file named rootfs.gz on linux machine which you will find at C:\Program Files\Altiris\Altiris Agent\Agents\Deployment\SBS\Images\ LinuxTarget-1\x86PC on NS

Now on Linux machine you need to perform some commands.

1. Place rootfs.gz in /root/ directory
2. Create file named nicinfo.ini with following contents in your /root/ directory.

[NICS]

0=xxxxxxxxxxxx

[xxxxxxxxxxxx]

MACADDR=000C29DFB84B

DHCP=TRUE

INTERFACE=eth0

1=yyyyyyyyyyyy

MACADDR=000C29DFB855

DHCP=FALSE

INTERFACE=eth1

Where xxxxxxxxxxxx and yyyyyyyyyyyy are 12 digit MAC of respective interfaces.

Follow the same pattern for all nics

3. Then follow these commands.

#cd /root/

#gunzip rootfs.gz

#mkdir /mnt/altiris

#mount –o loop roofs /mnt/altiris

#cp nicinfo.ini /mnt/altiris/

#umount /mnt/altiris

#gzip rootfs

4. This way will modify rootfs.gz
5. Now copy rootfs.gz file to original location on NS

Now your preboot is ready to boot. It will assign dhcp ip to only one nic and boot faster.

This should solve your issue.

All THE BEST

Fantastic, that was exactly what I was looking for.

Tnx!