Wednesday 16 February 2011

Deploy Studio set up and DHCP problems

I've been using Deploy Studio server for at least 1 year, perhaps 2, and it's fantastic. It's streamlined imaging perfectly, with workflows helping with different setups.

But all good things have their drawbacks, and upon upgrading Deploy Studio server from RC14 to RC20 everything appeared good, until two days later the Network Administrator rings me up and asks if he can unplug the Xserver, doh! It appeared to be the cause of much dismay for those two days, constantly giving all computers wrong DHCP information, for which is was not even meant to be giving!

We looked into it and the Xserver was responding to DHCP requests and giving "no-dns-server.example.com" as the dns server, overriding what the computers normally had set, which caused much much confusion. It was of course quite amazing that the network administrator managed to track it down to this problem, but I do suppose it took two days.

Upon closer examination, we noticed the DHCP service was "apparently" not running, but when we switched the "Netboot' service off it no longer responded to DHCP requests. So it was the Netboot service which was using part of the DHCP service, which Alan was sure was not 'usual'. Of course we were not sure what it did before the trouble started, whether or not it responded before of not, and whether it was just the fact it was dishing out the wrong DHCP information (IP Stack someone later told me) rather then no information.

We looked at the stopped DHCP service settings and saw one entry, which did have "no-dns-server.example.com" in it's properties. We deleted this entry, which was the only entry, but we still received responses. We measured these responses and it was now giving out the right information, which was better, but we would have preferred it not to give any information.

So to conclude, I whittled it down to the update from Deploy Studio RC14 to RC20, where Deploy Studio had changed, and perhaps added the "no-dns-server.example.com" entry the way Netboot used the  DHCP service.

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