ipxe.efi for aarch64

To make the AARCH64 ipxe process work using bifrost, I had to

git clone https://github.com/ipxe/ipxe.git
cd ipxe/src/
make bin-arm64-efi/snponly.efi ARCH=arm64
sudo cp bin-arm64-efi/snponly.efi /var/lib/tftpboot/ipxe.efi

This works for the Ampere reference implementation servers that use a Mellanox network interface card, which supports (only) snp.

Network traffic for an Ironic Node

I’ve set up a second cluster, and the Ironic nodes are not PXE booting. Specifically, if I watch the nodes boot via an IPMI serial-on-lan console, I see that they send out a DHCP request and never get a response back.

This is a problem I am familiar with from my days at Penguin. Time to dig in and understand the networking setup on the controller to see why it is not getting the packet. Or, possibly, why it is getting it and the response is getting dropped.

I have another cluster that is working properly, and I am going to look at the setup there to try and contrast it with the broken set up, and figure out my problem.

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Automating Baremetal Node Creation for Ironic

Sometime your shell scripts get out of control. Sometimes you are proud of them. Sometimes….both.

I need to be able to re-add a bunch of nodes to an OpenStack cluster on a regular basis. Yes, I could do this with Ansible, but, well, Ansible is great for doing something via SSH, and this just needs to be done here and now. So shell is fine.

This started as a one liner, and got a bit bigger.

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JNLP Access to BMC On Fedora

Ampere has two models of Servers out: Falcon and Mt. Jades. The Falcons are the older one, and make up many of our utility servers.

I recently had to get in to a serial console on the machine. The IPMI address hosts a web console. From that you can get a serial console on the server, but you need JNLP, which stands for Java Net Launch Protocol. It is implemented by IcedTea in OpenJDK: icedtea-web is the name of the RPM on Fedora 34.