David Mackintosh wrot
In the spirit of using tools beyond their original intent, I figured
out how to use cobbler to help automate setting up PXE install
environments for SuSE-family distributions.
http://wiki.xdroop.com/space/Linux/SuSE/Using+Cobbler+with+SuSE
Presumably the principles here could be extended to any Linux
distribution.
David,
Neat stuff!
Looking over the above example it seems that if you're going interactive
you could just leave off the kickstart parameter rather than just
passing in a filler argument. However, I have a suggestion that might
be useful.
If you pass the address of an autoyast file to --kickstart, cobbler will
write (behind the scenes) a "ks=blah" line to the kernel command line
parameters. I would expect SuSE would ignore this. However, adding a
--kopts parameter that referenced the file (URL) given in --kickstart
would seemingly allow passing in a SuSE answer file. Cobbler really
doesn't know what a kickstart is, technically, it's just a file to which
some templating voodoo can be applied, so that might be possible.
From http://www.suse.com/~ug/AutoYaST_FAQ.html it appears this
parameter is just "autoyast=" instead of "ks=", so that's pretty
simple. This would work today.
Unfortunately I have no experience generating AutoYAST files, though it
appears there are GUI tools to help with this.
One thing that comes to mind (for a new feature) is having a parameter
on "distro" that would accomodate various breeds of distros, such that
minor distribution tweaks could be made.
Example:
cobbler distro add --name=foo --distro=blah --kernel=blah --breed=suse
Obviously breed would default to kickstartable RH/Fedora-based distros.
I'd need someone to volunteer to do some SuSE testing though. Don't
have any machines here :)
Thoughts?
Thanks for pointing out that this is doable. I really like the idea
of making cobbler a bit more versatile.
--Michael
