Abstract
This document discloses, enables, and dates a method and system for driving a freshly imaged bare-metal server from power-on to a single-homed, remotely reachable management state without any console interaction, any human network operator, and — critically — without any cloud or on-network metadata source. A generator bakes a per-node convergence agent directly into the operating-system install media under the vendor-supplement ($OEM$) payload path. During installation the OS setup engine copies that agent onto the target file system. A tiny first-boot script then registers a privileged (SYSTEM) scheduled task that re-executes an idempotent convergence agent on every subsequent boot until a completion marker file appears. That marker is written on one and only one condition: the node's configured default gateway is actually reachable. Each convergence run (a) installs vendor drivers baked into the media (so a NIC driver that requires a reboot to bind is completed by the next boot's run), (b) elects the management NIC by vendor interface description rather than link speed or DHCP, and (c) suppresses rival IP addresses and default routes so that exactly one static IP address and one default route survive. A later out-of-band stage renames physical NICs to deterministic intent names by vendor match plus physical-slot order. Per-node answer file and OS payload are packed into a single combined UDF ISO to satisfy single-URI virtual-media constraints of common baseboard management controllers. This publication is released to establish prior art and bar patenting of the disclosed mechanism.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Assuncao, gustavo matthew, "Media-Baked Convergent First-Boot Network Bring-Up", Technical Disclosure Commons, ()
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/10964