Michael DeHaan wrote:
Dhawal Doshy wrote:
Hello Michael and List,
i recently started testing cobbler for my setup and quite like the ease
of provisioning.
[SNIP]
However each of these creates a /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/distro and not
/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default. In the production setup i have the
'default' file being updated manually with different labels to support
multiple OSes.. and a Display file to present the options at the boot:
prompt.
My question is how do it do this using cobbler?
If you are interested, cobbler can keep a MAC address database in
cobbler so the systems will PXE boot to what they are supposed to be
when they do not have an OS on them, based on the MAC address. This
makes the defaults file unneccessary.
cobbler system add --name=AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:EE --profile=fc5i386dbserver
cobbler system add --name=AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF --profile=fc5i386webserver
I tried that for a test case.. but in most cases we are not aware of the
MAC address till the system boots up (when its already too late and time
consuming to note it down and create a system tailored for it).. hence
our need for the 'default' thingy in pxelinux.cfg
I will definitely add the menus though as that appears to be a very
common hosting use case.
That'll be nice..
OT, but I would also suggest starting to reference your kickstart files
on the local system (i.e. --kickstart=/path/to/file) as that way you can
start taking advantage of cobbler's kickstart templating features should
you want to use them later. However what you are doing is fine if you
don't need that just yet.
We might need templating of the kickstart file (if i understand the
concept correctly) since we offer a host of pre-configured servers (mx,
smtp, delivery, web, database etc..) with standard and custom partitioning.
As for Ubuntu, it's pretty cool to see this:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KickstartCompatibility, which seems to
imply you can do fully automatic installs from Cobbler without changing
anything. Awesome.
cool.. once we are done with a functional setup of cobbler, we intend on
taking up koan as well (just for kicks).. though we rarely re-provision
a server and virtualization is still not explored completely.
- dhawal
