Re: [et-mgmt-tools] Cobbler idea: PXE boot profile menu

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



Matt S Unix Administrator wrote:
Michael DeHaan wrote:
David Mackintosh wrote:
I was about to write some wrappers to do this, but it occurs to me that
it might be easier to do inside cobbler itself.

How about instead of just having pxelinux.cfg/default kick straight into
a hard disk boot (which is a nice, safe default) it pops up a list of
the
profiles it knows about, and will accept those names at the prompt?

This would let you do one-time installs without having to generate
a cobbler section for it.

The pxelinux.cfg/default file would then look like

default local
display pxelinux-default.msg
timeout 100
prompt 1

label local
    localboot 0

label SLES-10-std
    kernel /images/SLES-10/vmlinuz
    append lang ksdevice=eth0 text devfs=nomount $OTHER-THINGS

[...]

I would suspect for most sites there are only going to be a few
profiles,
but it probably wouldn't be too hard to write the piece which generates
pxelinux-default.msg to put the profiles into columns for easier
display.

It would probably be simplest to do this inside cobbler rather than
writing a bolt-on which figures all this out.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

_______________________________________________
et-mgmt-tools mailing list
et-mgmt-tools@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools
This has come up before, and it's a good idea.

One of the key issues here is that the pxelinux menus don't seem like
they would scale very well with a very large number of profiles, so
I've been hesitant to make that default behavior.   Honestly I'm not
entirely aware of what happens when there are 100 profiles -- if you
could figure this out, that would be great, and I'll implement it :)

Patches also accepted, of course.

If it's going to be done outside of Cobbler, it would basically
require understanding /var/lib/cobbler/profiles and
/var/lib/cobbler/distros, merging the options as appropriate, and then
regenerating the file when sync is run. Not too bad, really... (note that the formats of those files are subject to change though, so
yes, you're right in that it would be better if part of the cobbler
tree).

--MPD

_______________________________________________
et-mgmt-tools mailing list
et-mgmt-tools@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools
You can create submenus which contain whatever options perhaps distros
or some delimiter could define what should constitute a menu item.

The default could contain:

menu label Windows
        kernel menu.c32
        append windows.conf

menu label Linux
        kernel menu.c32
        append linux.conf


_______________________________________________
et-mgmt-tools mailing list
et-mgmt-tools@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools
Excellent!  I'll check this out...


[Index of Archives]     [Fedora Users]     [Fedora Legacy List]     [Fedora Maintainers]     [Fedora Desktop]     [Fedora SELinux]     [Big List of Linux Books]     [Yosemite News]     [KDE Users]     [Fedora Tools]

  Powered by Linux