let me start this off by just laying it out there: i hate xcat.
let me rephrase that, I LOVE one part of xcat and hate the rest; the ability to remote power ibm blades en masse without having to use the web gui is totally sweet, but the way it handles kickstart (tftp) and dhcp is the most absurd thing i have ever seen.
so i'm hoping someone can help me here. i'm on late today, doing the classic 11-8 PM shift. in reading emails from last night while at the gym, i encountered a bunch saying "the blades are down".
now last night i had configured some new rendernodes to pick up on our render vlan and kickstarted them in a more 'traditional' manner (using a hand-built tftp server and studio-standard kickstart files etc). so as you do, i added the new rendernodes' mac address to dhcp (this is on our xcat server, remember). while i was doing this i noticed that the dhcpd.leases file was empty (sure, who cares if its empty you must be all thinking, as i thought). anyway they picked up, kickstarted fine, started rendering and i went home. turns out that adding those machines to dhcpd.conf on our xcat server removed the other 175 blades' information from dhcp.leases, so when they maxed out their local resources and had to be restarted by our render wrangler over night, they came up and couldn't get leases, so everyone thought they were down. the whole effing farm.
so i keep getting calls, when i'm supposed to have a nice lie-in cause i'm working the late shift and i come in early to find its a simple matter of doing a 'makedhcp -a' on the xcat server to recreate the dhcpd.leases file, but does this mean i literally can't add hosts that aren't under xcat's control to dhcp on my xcat server without breaking the whole farm? what a joke! i mean of course the blades shouldn't be on dhcp anyway, but this is something i inherited not something i designed. can anybody tell me if its at all possible to run dhcp for xcat in a more traditional manner (i.e. - through /etc/dhcpd.conf rather that /var/lib/dhcpd/dhcpd.leases)?