Overview of Anonymous Clients

When booting registered PA-RISC clients, the clients’ IP addresses and MAC addresses were entered in the /etc/opt/ignite/instl_boottab file. If the clients were Itanium®-based, they were registered in the /etc/bootptab file.

An anonymous client can be booted from an Ignite-UX server without an IP address previously mapped to its MAC address. Anonymous clients boot using an IP address provided by the server.

Using anonymous client booting on a network is useful when you have many different systems that must be booted, installed, or recovered. It relieves you from the task of configuring for each specific system and eliminates the errors inherent in typing IP addresses and MAC addresses. Such an error could cause IP addresses to be accidentally assigned to more than one computer at a time.

The /etc/opt/ignite/instl_boottab file is used to provide PA-RISC systems with anonymous client booting. Within the instl_boottab file, if there are IP addresses not assigned to any MAC address, those IP addresses are available to lease to requesting anonymous clients.

Itanium-based clients use DHCP to boot anonymously.