Msquared wrote:
I'm having some trouble understanding where everything goes under cobbler.
If I use 'cobbler import' or 'cobbler distro add', do I put the files
somewhere in /var/www/cobbler first?
Cobbler will do this for you. The purpose of cobbler distro add is to
register the locations of the files you are interested provisioning.
Cobbler will automagically copy them to the right locations needed to
enable provisioning (which reside in /tftpboot and /var/www/cobbler,
respectively). If you want to force cobbler to "re-do" this, just run
"cobbler sync".
If you are passing in an rsync mirror to "cobbler import", cobbler
_does_ copy files for the rest of the tree (not just the kernel/initrd),
and this is actually a pretty powerful way to start off. What happens
then is you create a local mirror of whatever distribution, including
the entire kickstart tree. This makes local provisioning very very fast.
However, if you already have the operating system tree locally, that's
not as important.
You really don't want to be copying files by hand into the
/var/www/cobbler directory, as cobbler will want to manage the contents
of this directory itself. If you have a kickstart tree you just want to
make available, (and you don't want to do the rsync:// import, which is
really a great way to do this), it's easy enough to just copy that tree
into your apache root /var/www/html or even cobbler's
reserved-for-random-uses-of-people-who-know-what-they-are-doing
directory /var/www/cobbler/local_mirror. In general though, I don't
expect people to have to do that -- they either are using a http://,
ftp://, or nfs:// kickstart tree someone else has already set up, or
they'll be doing an import from a rync mirror to establish a new
kickstart tree themselves that they can use for provisioning.
It seems that 'cobbler import' doesn't actually copy files for me, so I'm
not really sure what it does.
The walkthrough at http://wiki.xdroop.com/space/RedHat/kickstart/Cobbler
doesn't seem to help me, as it doesn't tell me what I need to put where.
I've tried to copy the contents of my Fedora 6 DVD to
/var/www/cobbler/kickstarts/Fedora6 and run 'cobbler import
--path=/var/www/cobbler/kickstarts/Fedora6', and then run 'cobbler list',
but the output looks nothing like the output presented on
http://wiki.xdroop.com/space/RedHat/kickstart/Cobbler, instead it looks
like this:
First off, I do have to thank Dave a lot for making Cobbler posts on his
site. Cobbler has changed just a little bit those original articles are
written, and you should probably be looking at the latest manpage --
http://cobbler.et.redhat.com/cobbler.html
The long-output command that generates what's on Dave's site is now
"cobbler report", and "cobbler list" has been abbreviated to make it
more usable. That's why the output looks different.
Distros:
var_www_cobbler_kickstarts_Fedora6_images_pxeboot
var_www_cobbler_kickstarts_Fedora6_images_xen
Repos:
Profiles:
var_www_cobbler_kickstarts_Fedora6_images_pxeboot
var_www_cobbler_kickstarts_Fedora6_images_xen
Systems:
This actually looks fine, as it shows cobbler has imported 2 distros and
made a profile for each of them. That's good.
I can't seem to get 'cobbler distro add' to work either, not that I'm
entirely sure what it does. Where does it get the repository files from?
Do I need to do some preparation of the files from the DVD, or download a
mirror first?
Cobbler has a tiered concepts of Distributions, Profiles, and Systems.
Distributions contain kernel and initrd information. Profiles
take Distributions and add kickstarts to them. Systems contain Profile
information and potentially some system specific information. Whenever
you run these commands, it updates the cobbler "database" in
/var/lib/cobbler/* -- and will copy files needed around to locations in
/tftpboot and /var/www/cobbler. So these commands are doing something :)
If you want to download from a mirror, the best way to do that is to
skip "distro add" altogether and just do:
cobbler import --mirror=rsync://blah --mirror-name=blah
as mentioned in the manpage. That sets you up with a local mirror of
everything you need, with the kickstart files configured appropriately
to point into that tree over http:// -- fully automatic installs that
you can customize later as needed. More advanced use cases will require
running distro add commands manually, but if you just want a small lab
setup for PXE booting Fedora and a few other distros, doing an rsync://
import isn't a bad way to go and will pretty much fill out "reasonably
sane" kickstarts for you automatically.
I tried to run cobbler distro add but ended up with a very strange error:
cobbler distro add --name=myxendistro
--kernel=/var/www/cobbler/kickstarts/Fedora6/images/xen/vmlinuz
--initrd=/var/www/cobbler/kickstarts/Fedora6/images/xen/initrd.img
The result is:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/cobbler.py", line 505, in main
BootCLI(sys.argv).run()
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/cobbler.py", line 102, in run
self.curry_args(self.args[1:], self.commands['toplevel'])
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/cobbler.py", line 421, in curry_args
commands[args[0]](args[1:])
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/cobbler.py", line 469, in distro
return self.curry_args(args, self.commands['distro'])
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/cobbler.py", line 421, in curry_args
commands[args[0]](args[1:])
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/cobbler.py", line 386, in distro_edit
return self.apply_args(args,commands,on_ok)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/cobbler.py", line 409, in apply_args
on_ok()
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/cobbler.py", line 385, in <lambda>
on_ok = lambda: self.api.distros().add(distro, with_copy=self.api.sync_flag)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/collection.py", line 97, in add
lite_sync.add_single_distro(ref.name)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/action_litesync.py", line 60, in add_single_distro
self.sync.write_distro_file(distro)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/action_sync.py", line 733, in write_distro_file
clone.kernel_options = self.hash_to_string(clone.kernel_options)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/action_sync.py", line 885, in hash_to_string
buffer = buffer + key + "=" + value + " "
TypeError: cannot concatenate 'str' and 'int' objects
Hmm, this worked fine for me but what I imagine is happening is that
somewhere in the configuration files, some of the parameters are being
stored as integers instead of strings. Not being able to reproduce this,
but just looking at the code, this looks like a fix:
diff -r fbdb0203b3ee41519942c705ec800333b70c3365 cobbler/action_sync.py
--- a/cobbler/action_sync.py Wed Feb 21 10:30:33 2007 -0500
+++ b/cobbler/action_sync.py Thu Feb 22 10:44:21 2007 -0500
@@ -874,8 +874,8 @@ class BootSync:
for key in hash:
value = hash[key]
if value is None:
- buffer = buffer + key + " "
+ buffer = buffer + str(key) + " "
else:
- buffer = buffer + key + "=" + value + " "
+ buffer = buffer + str(key) + "=" + str(value) + " "
return buffer
The question is how did they get this way? I don't know, as unless the
files in /var/lib/cobbler were edited directly, I would expect that file
to contain strings as opposed to integers -- if you want to email me
your /var/lib/cobbler/distros file, that would be useful in tracking
down the problem.
Any ideas?
Regards, Msquared...
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