I encountered an interesting feature of the current HOS 2.0 installer this evening. The incorrect PXE mac addresses were configured in the servers.yml file for the initial deployment. As a result of this misconfiguration the install nodes could not PXE boot.

The interesting part came when the correct mac addresses were applied to the servers.yml file. The file was re-committed to the local git repo and then cobbler redeployed as follows:

cd ~/helion/hos/ansible
git add -A
git commit -m "Update servers.yml with correct PXE macs";
ansible-playbook -i hosts/localhost cobbler-deploy.yml

PXE still failed and when the /var/logs/syslog file was reviewed for DHCP messages the original mac addresses were still being used.

A search of the entire deployer filesystem did not reveal the source of the obsolete mac addresses – cobbler must store these encoded.

The correct procedure to follow when a mac address in the servers.yml file has to be changed is to remove the node or nodes from cobbler as well as committing the changes to the git repository.

Remove a node from cobbler:

cobbler system remove --name $name

Remove all nodes from cobbler:

for i in `cobbler system list`;
do cobbler system remove --name $i;
done

[note: root privileges required to run cobbler]