how to do host lookups

[iucounu9]

Hi,

I am using a particular open source virtualisation platform, which has ipxe as the PXE implementation. In our kickstart menu (which is php), we need to do a hostname lookup to choose the appropriate local server as there are different boot servers in different global locations. Currently, on our other closed-source virtualisation platforms it is done via 'nslookup' when pxebooting. The nslookup command has not been compiled into ipxe on the open source virtualisation platform. I have requested that they add it. I could replace their ipxe rom with my own, but I thought I'd explore a different way of doing this. I've tried:

<?php $ip = gethostbyname('wds'); ?>
set wds <?php echo $ip; ?>
set net0/next-server ${wds}

However, this does not work. The lookup is successful when I use the 'show' command to print it, but it doesn't seem to get read into the variable properly. Any ideas? Or is there another way of getting this functionality?

Thanks,

Cam