[et-mgmt-tools] Re: Cobbler 0.4.0 released

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Michael DeHaan wrote:
Michael DeHaan wrote:
Cobbler 0.4.0 is out. RPMs are already up on et.redhat.com and will be pushed out to the mirrors shortly.

The main feature for this release is support for PXE menus. For those wanting to use PXE menus, the best thing to do is set all machines in your datacenter/lab to "PXE first". To access the PXE menu, type "menu" at the prompt, otherwise cobbler will fall through to local boot in 20 seconds. If you have a cobbler definition made for a system, that system will bypass the PXE menu. This is true whether you have a certain MAC set to a specific profile (ex: cobbler system add --name=AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF ...) or if you have a "default" system entry (cobbler system add --name=default --profile=blah). If you have a default system entry and want to use the new menus, just run "cobbler system delete --name=default" and then "cobbler sync". Presto, you've got PXE menus. This is also documented in the manpage.

As mentioned previously on the list, I'm also reinstating the usage of Cheetah for vastly improved kickstart templating. See http://www.cheetahtemplate.org/learn for more information. Basically the existing kickstart templating is now improved with the ability to do if-statements and the like. Cobbler will allow either TEMPLATE::foo or $foo for kickstart templating substitution. The one thing I've found is that a macro such as $(list-hard-drives) does need to be escaped to \$(list-hard-drives) in kickstart files. Things like passwords (crypted passwords often contain "$") don't need to be escaped and are otherwise fine. If you do escape them though, it won't hurt. The new /etc/cobbler/kickstart* files have them escaped. If you have your own kickstart files, it would be worth checking for any dollarsigns that were unescaped, or you might see an error next time you run "cobbler sync".

This release also no longer requires running "cobbler sync" after "profile add" or "system add" commands as much as cobbler used to. Editing configuration files behind the scenes, or wanting to regenerate PXE menus will, however, still require running "cobbler sync". The features made to minimize the need for sync were mainly done for applications using cobbler as a provisioning library and those users that occasionally forget to run sync and post questions to the list :) I've also incorporated some random minor bugfixes, including passing "--basedir" to createrepo and manpage fixes related to the "--local-filename" option as mentioned last week.

Questions?  Comments?   Fire away.

--Michael

RHEL4/Centos users:

Apparently menu.c32 (required for PXE menus) isn't provided by the syslinux package on RHEL4... I'll probably end up bundling it and storing it in /var/lib/cobbler. For now, you can copy it yourself to /usr/lib/syslinux/menu.c32 and things will work fine. I'll release a 0.4.1 fix that will bundle this file shortly.



Apparently bundling Cheetah is causing some evil problems on older systems, I'm going to back that bit out and add it as a Requires: in the RPM. This will be released shortly as 0.4.1.

RHEL4/Centos users ca get Cheetah here: http://www.python.org/pyvault/centos-4-i386/repodata/repoview/python-cheetah-0-0.9.18-1.el4.pyv.html .. actually I think Centos already has it in the default repo(s) ... correct me if I'm wrong.

--Michael


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