Round Robin Network Booting
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LTSP is a thin (or fat) client set up that has diskless Linux clients network boot. I have pfsense's DHCP service assign these clients IPs, along with the "next-server" IP and filename so they know where to find the boot image. This works great, but now I want to add a second LTSP server and would like pfsense to issue alternate next-server IPs in a round-robin fashion to booting clients. But I can only enter one next-server IP in the web interface.
Is there some way to round-robin the next-server IP such that network booting clients would be equally balanced between the two servers? Command line solution would be fine too.
UPDATE: I found this:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/k12osn/2005-August/msg00336.htmlIt says I could use DNS to have a single hostname pointed to two different LTSP server IPs, which would automatically round-robin, like
ltsp A 10.0.14.252 ltsp A 10.0.14.253
Then I could just set "next-server" as the "ltsp". This seems like a good approach, but how can I set that up in pfsense? The DNS forwarder has a "Host Overrides" section for local DNS entries, but those only allow one IP per hostname, so I am bumping into the same issue again.
Mods: Sorry, I think this belongs in the DNS & DHCP section.
![Technical - File Manager_153.png](/public/imported_attachments/1/Technical - File Manager_153.png)
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Managed to solve this already so just wanted to provide feedback in case someone else also needs this.
Reference: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=64414.0
Using the command line, create a file with additional hosts, like /etc/rr-hosts:
192.168.1.11 ltsp-server 192.168.1.12 ltsp-server
Back in the web GUI in DNS forwarder options, under "Advanced" add:
addn-hosts=/etc/rr-hosts
After settings are applied, you can ping the hostname repeatedly and notice it alternate between the IPs each time.
:)