As some of you know, Cobbler has a feature where it can import a
rsync:// mirror and make all of the distributions on it
near-instantaneously installable over the local network -- not only do
you not have to run the "distro add" commands, but it will be using a
local copy of the kickstart tree to avoid going out on the net, etc.
The workflow is basically:
"cobbler import --mirror=rsync://foo.example.com --mirror-name=foo"
"cobbler list" # to find what the profile name is
# optionally edit the kickstart template in /etc/cobbler if you want
more than @base
"cobbler system add --name=AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF --profile=blah"
"cobbler sync'
One thing I've noticed though, is that something like an FC-6 mirror is
rather huge, and many users won't have enough disk space to import a lot
of distributions this way. I am also wanting to limit bandwidth to the
mirrors so users won't be pulling down more than they need.
So, I've created a rsync excludes file that removes some of the content
I don't need ("rsync ... --exclude-from=rsync.exclude"), and in 0.3.4
this is installed automatically as /etc/cobbler/rsync.exclude -- it's
only used for the import command.
The default files to _not_ rsync are...
**/debug/**
**/ppc/**
**/source/**
**/iso/**
Before, import would rsync everything, including ISO's. This was lame,
so I've decided to prune the list a good bit. Since the file is user
customizable, if you didn't have any x86_64 machines, you could add a
line that said "**/x86_64/**" and skip a good amount of data there also.
I'm not sure how common it is to install debug RPM's or source RPM's
from a kickstart tree, so does anyone think those should be _enabled_ by
default for the rsync import?
Anyhow, a heads up on the new feature if no one was using "import"
before due to space requirements.
It's already pushed to the hg repository and if there aren't any
complaints, I'll probably release this in a few days after it gets added
to the documentation. If anyone else has any other comments on the
import feature, fire away...
Thanks,
--Michael
