Michael DeHaan wrote:
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
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I've pushed the above --breed option to the Mercurial repo.
> hg clone http://hg.et.redhat.com/hg/emd/applications/cobbler cobbler
Testing from SuSE users would be great. Note that this only covers PXE
at the moment. I do not forsee koan --replace-self ever supporting
alternative breeds (the code is rather RH specific and I don't have much
time to keep those other distros working), though this may come into
play for use with Xen and other things that libvirt will come to
support. Of course if someone is interested in getting that running,
patches are accepted. The same goes for porting koan to other distros.
--Michael
