On Thu, 2007-01-25 at 21:52 -0700, Stephen John Smoogen wrote: > So I am wanting to play with the various et tools with our RHEL > systems (spanning from 2.1 to 4). I can see that cobbler would be used > to help provision systems from a PXE boot line, and I would like to be > able to use prm and cft to 'kickstart' our automated configuration > environment... but I would like to get an idea of what the developers > see as how these 'should' be put together before I go down a lot of > blind alleys. So if someone is starting from scratch in building an > enterprise environment.. where to begin :). That's a very good question, and we haven't really expressed how this wil all fit together. I think the two things you want to familiarize yourself is (1) cobbler and (2) puppet; which one you want to start using first depends a little on what you see as your most urgent need: provisioning or getting a handle on config management. Eventually, you'd want to run both, probably on the same machine, and kickstart your boxes into a basic setup and have puppet give it a 'persona' (I attach a sample kickstart file that I use to kickstart my fc6 boxes that way; it'll also work with rhel5, but with older releases you need to jump through a couple of hoops to install puppet from FE in %post) Cft and prm are both a little rough still; prm (or the larger question of distributing config bits) needs some love, especially in the context of virtual appliances. I am in the process of defining best practices around organizing your config server (discussions on the puppet-users list) to make distribution cleaner and easier. You should be able to use cft by itself right now; it's at a very early stage, but already pretty useful for simple config tweaks. I would love to hear more about your ideas/expectations/experiences creating an infrastructure with these tools. And of course any questions you have. David
# DomU kickstart with puppet install # Installs 147 packages / 590MB # Tested with FC6 # The machine running the puppetmaster must be called 'puppet' install reboot url --url URL_TO_INSTALL_TREE repo --name=extras --baseurl=URL_TO_EXTRAS_REPO lang en_US.UTF-8 keyboard us xconfig --driver "fbdev" --resolution 800x600 --depth 24 network --device eth0 --bootproto dhcp rootpw --iscrypted YOUR_ROOT_PASSWD_HERE firewall --enabled --port=22:tcp authconfig --enableshadow --enablemd5 selinux --enforcing timezone --utc America/Los_Angeles bootloader --location=mbr --driveorder=xvda --append="rhgb quiet" clearpart --all --initlabel --drives=xvda part /boot --fstype ext3 --size=100 --ondisk=xvda part pv.2 --size=0 --grow --ondisk=xvda volgroup domu --pesize=32768 pv.2 logvol / --fstype ext3 --name=lv00 --vgname=domu --size=1024 --grow logvol swap --fstype swap --name=lv01 --vgname=domu --size=272 --grow --maxsize=544 %packages --nobase crontabs dhclient dhcpv6_client nfs-utils openssh-clients openssh-server yum puppet %post --nochroot exec > /mnt/sysimage/root/post-nochroot.txt 2>&1 test -f /tmp/netinfo && cp /tmp/netinfo /mnt/sysimage/tmp/ %post exec > /root/post.txt 2>&1 /sbin/chkconfig --level 345 puppet on # Figure out the FQDN if [ -f /tmp/netinfo ] ; then FQDN=`(source /tmp/netinfo; [ -n "$DOMAIN" ] && echo $HOSTNAME.$DOMAIN || echo $HOSTNAME)` hostname $FQDN /usr/sbin/puppetd -o -v --waitforcert 600 fi
