Abstract
This document discloses, as enabling public prior art, a method and system for driving an unattended bare-metal operating-system (OS) installation to completion by inferring install progress from the network traffic that a server's out-of-band management controller (BMC) generates while it streams the installation image over virtual media. A range-capable HTTP ISO server instruments every byte-range request per served file into a compact {bytes, requests, last-read} record. A dual-threshold traffic-quiescence rule — a primary rule (image byte floor reached AND read activity quiet for a short window) plus a low-water/long-quiet fallback and a hard-timeout safety fallback — concludes that the image-apply phase is complete. On that conclusion an out-of-band controller (1) ejects the virtual optical device, (2) clears the vendor one-time virtual-CD boot attribute so the persistent boot order points at the freshly-written disk, and (3) issues a power ForceRestart. As a result the installer's own post-apply reboot boots the applied disk and proceeds to specialization/first-boot, instead of re-entering the installation media and stalling forever on an interactive, remotely-unclickable dialog. Multiple nodes are monitored concurrently, each with an independent quiescence decision and its own hard-timeout fallback. Crucially, no agent, callback, PXE state transition, or any other code runs inside the target OS — completion is detected entirely from the media-fetch side channel and acted upon entirely over the BMC control plane.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Assuncao, gustavo matthew, "Traffic-Quiescence Virtual-Media Eject: Inferring Bare-Metal OS-Install Progress from BMC ISO-Fetch Telemetry", Technical Disclosure Commons, ()
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/10960