Centos – one-time PXE boot from Linux on HP Proliant hardware

centoshp-proliantpxe-boot

So, I use Systemimager to provision new CentOS 5.3 hosts via PXE. We have a couple servers that are just test targets that we'll reimage a couple-dozen times a day, and normally, getting them to PXE-boot is as simple as logging onto their iLO interfaces, rebooting, and hitting F12 at the appropriate time. My question is, is it possible to tell the server via the linux commandline to perform a "one-time PXE boot" during its next reboot? Each reimage cycle this would save me many minutes of clicking, typing, waiting for Java to load the ilo console, etc. I know Dell has this capability via OpenIPMI, but I was wondering if HP had similar functionality.

Many thanks!
–Lee

Best Answer

This should be possible with ipmitool. Just run:

ipmitool chassis bootdev pxe

And your next boot should be a PXE boot.

Edit: This doesn't seem to work for HP iLO2. However, you can SSH in to the iLO2 interface and reconfigure it there by issuing

set /system1/bootconfig1/bootsource5 bootorder=1

On systems that don't support booting from USB key it will be bootsource4 instead. For complete details, see the iLO2 Scripting Reference

You can issue this command as an argument to ssh and that should work as well.

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