[et-mgmt-tools] Old Stuff Needs To Work Too: Lilo compatibility / Koan and RHEL3

[Michael DeHaan <mdehaan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Two things:

===

One.

Koan had some lilo support before, though I've discovered a few things 
about it recently, and they are now fixed in mercurial.

So, if you were playing with koan before (either via "cobbler 
enchant/transmogrify" or directly ("koan --replace-self") and had 
systems using lilo, they will be a lot happier now.    Changes are 
available in hg and will probably be pushed out to Fedora sometime next 
week.  (Cobbler 0.3.4, Koan 0.2.5)

Lilo changes:

(1)  Before, one had to run lilo manually after running koan to apply 
the config.   Koan now does this automagically if lilo is being used as 
the bootloader.

(2)  It turns out that Lilo can't deal with multiple boot images having 
the same display value (ex: "kickstart" and "kickstart"), so if you run 
koan multiple times by accident, you're out of luck.  Now they are 
labelled as "kick%s" where %s is the number of seconds since epoch (Jan 
1, 1970).   I had limited space to work with :)

(3)  while koan would correctly modify the lilo or grub config based on 
what was installed, it got confused if both grub and lilo were 
installed, and would only edit grub, even if lilo was the active 
bootloader.  It now probes to see which bootloader is active and 
modifies the correct one.

===

Two.

The other thing I'm going to be doing shortly is making koan compilable 
with RHEL3 -- some users don't have PXE setups (cobbler can provision 
RHEL3 via PXE fine), and currently koan and "enchant" won't work for 
them there.   So, when this gets done, Cobbler will support RHEL4+, 
derivatives, and FC5+ -- and koan will support all of that with the 
addition of RHEL 3.   Obviously, no virtualization support on RHEL 3...

--Michael