[Techtalk] serverless IP assignment?

Malcolm rannirl-lc at otherkin.net
Mon Feb 11 18:41:50 EST 2002


On Monday 11 February 2002 05:35 pm, Raven, corporate courtesan wrote:

> of.  You won't have any machines likely to be sitting on the IPs that
> newly booted machines will be using (thus making the duplicate IPs a lot
> less likely).

Except if they are all powered up at around the same time, which is quite 
possible. I would be entirely unsurprised to discover several machines on the 
same powerbar that get turned off every night (and thus come up together the 
next day).

> 	If all broken machines are going to be shipped back to y'all for
> repair, this is okay -- you can just reimage it and have it search for
> an IP again when it's plugged in.

Machines are generally repaired in the field if at all possible (usually by 
shipping the end user replacement parts and instructions).

> 	The reason you might want machines to keep their IPs is power
> cuts.  When your five machines on a network all come back up, chances
> are that they won't all grab unique IPs out of the booting pool, and you
> have conflict and problems again.  

See above, this is not an unlikely situation as it's more than just power 
cuts, but end users turning the machines off (generally by hitting the power 
switch, which is a whole other set of problems).

> duplicates.  This is bad, too.  It can be somewhat ameliorated by having
> a large pool of IPs to boot with, but I don't know how much space you've
> got to play with, or how many machines are likely to be on one network.

I believe the largest current network has about 50 in it. Mostly it will be a 
dozen or less. I was hoping to use the 10.x.x.x, but every box has to be able 
to talk to the third part machine which is netmasks at 255.255.255.0.

> all on good UPSs) or brokenness management.  If you're going to have
> users moving machines between locations and you have different subnets
> for those locations, then you're stuck with autodetect every time.  Pick
> whichever one's best for your setup and run with that.

As far as I can tell, we are stuck with autodetect each time. I was looking 
for the cleanest way of doing this. 

> > Topology is basically everyone on the same subnet. No routers or anything
> > to worry about. Sometimes the boxes may be run as standalone machines (no
> > network at all).
> 	How are you handling DNS and routing, then?  

I'm not, there isn't any. Each location is a self contained network. (Not 
entirely, each machine also has a modem it uses to 'dial home' as it were, 
but no routing is needed between the internal and external networks at this 
point in time).

These are essentially embedded devices, they don't have to do much, they just 
have PC hardware inside the box.

> > Not a problem as there's no switches involved.
> 	It's less bad if it's all hubs, but still somewhat unhappy.

It's all hubs. :)

> 	Will you be able to push your new code onto the boxes already
> in the field, or will you have to interoperate with however they get
> their IPs?  (If the latter, the above solution should work around that.)

I get to entirely wipe the drives of the existing machines and start over. :-)
(Unfortunately this is done by sending them CDs, so the entire process has to 
be automated and identical for each machine).


-- 
Beauty carved in flesh
Desire set in stone.
Evolution calling...
Afraid to be alone.
- 'Sand' Spider Lilies

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