Previously the orchestrator ran a full DHCP server on a dedicated
br-vetting bridge (10.77.0.0/24), which required a hypervisor-level
bridge + physical cabling onto that bridge for every repaired host.
Real-world bite: the LXC's br-vetting had no L2 path to the target
host's PXE NIC, so DHCPDISCOVERs never reached eth1 and PXE silently
timed out.
dnsmasq's proxy-DHCP mode is the idiomatic answer: it coexists with
the LAN's existing DHCP server (UniFi, etc.), never assigns an IP
itself, and only supplements the PXE options. No dedicated bridge,
no VLAN, no cabling changes \u2014 dnsmasq binds to the LAN interface
and layers option 66/67 + the PXE BINL on top of the real DHCP
exchange. The MAC allowlist still gates replies, so random LAN
clients booting from network get nothing.
Template switches dhcp-range=<start,end,lease> to
dhcp-range=<cidr>,proxy and replaces dhcp-boot= for first-boot ROM
clients with pxe-service= directives (the correct proxy-mode
chainload form). Validation drops the dhcp_range regex for a
net.ParseCIDR check on pxe.subnet. Config, production/example yaml,
and pxe-setup.sh swap --dhcp-range for --subnet.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
josh
506c856046