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raspberrypi / piserver

Raspberry Pi Server wizard to serve Raspbian to network booting Pis
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Dynamic Hostname #95

Closed locutusofsand closed 4 years ago

locutusofsand commented 4 years ago

I accidentally posted this over at the rpi-eeprom repo and they kindly directed me back here.

I am planning on deploying about 30 Pi's in an industrial environment at individual work centers. I am going to use them much like a kiosk to do various web based functions. The pages I need to serve up are unique to each work center. Ideally I would like to boot directly to the needed page. The only way that I have thought to do that is if I could give each of the Pi's its own host name and use that host name to populate the link in the script I use to boot from. Is there any way that I could tie the description field under the Clients tab in PiServer to the hostname of each device?

maxnet commented 4 years ago

Piserver is typically used in proxy dhcp mode, working together with an existing DHCP server in the network. In that scenario the duty to provide a hostname is on the main DHCP server that hands out the IP-address, so outside of Piserver's control. While Piserver also has an alternative option to work in standalone DHCP server mode, in which it is theoretically possible to let it hand out hostnames, I am not sure if its usage is common enough to justify adding an option to assign hostnames to the GUI.

Why are you unable to use IP/MAC/serial instead?

locutusofsand commented 4 years ago

I do currently have this setup on a server with dual NIC's and I am running it standalone DHCP on one of those NIC's.

I understanding this use case being too irregular to add anything to the GUI.

I followed your suggestion of using the MAC address. I changed the name of the workcenter pages to match their corresponding MAC address and used

mac=$(cat /sys/class/net/eth0/address)

inside my script to grab the MAC address.

This is working so I am going to close the issue. The only downside is my boot time went from 2:10 to 6:10 with this change so I am going to have to track down the reason chrome takes so long to open the page.

Thanks for the help.