Bryan K. Wright wrote:
Hi folks,
Here's a note I sent recently to Michael DeHaan, and his response.
He suggested I forward it to the list. As he suggests, I'll take a look
at Cobbler's trigger infrastructure and see what would be required
to get Cobbler to play with dnsmasq.
Great!
Triggers are covered in this email:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2007-April/msg00069.html
Basically you'll want to look around at "api.py" in the source checkout
to see what methods are available, call
cobbler_api.distros().find(name) on the first argument to the script,
and retrieve the cobbler object for the system. From there, you
can see what you want to manipulate for dnsmasq. Once you have a
cobbler object, you can access all of the information in
"item_system.py", which includes things like the --pxe-address values,
what the name of it's profile is, and so forth.
All of the above assumes something would be done in Python.... this
doesn't have to be the case. If you want to write something in another
language, that script will still be called with the system object name
as the first argument. Other information about that system can then be
gathered from /var/lib/cobbler/systems by parsing the YAML file ...
Perl's YAML.pm, I believe Ruby has a yaml.rb, etc. Of course, using
the cobbler API would be better/easier -- and would avoid the need to
use a YAML module.
Now there currently isn't a value for --pxe-hostname in the systems
source code (item_system.py) to allow setting that parameter, but it can
be added in the same way that pxe-address is already in the code. (A
minor tweak will also need to be made to cobbler.py to allow that
parameter to be used on the command line)
I'd be glad to help out with this, though I'll be away giving a
presentation at Red Hat Summit for the rest of this week.
Bryan Wright
------- Forwarded Message
Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 08:15:51 -0400
From: Michael DeHaan <mdehaan@xxxxxxxxxx>
User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.10 (Macintosh/20070221)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: bryan@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Bryan K. Wright wrote:
Bryan,
Hi Michael,
Thanks for writing cobbler! I've been using it for a little
while now, and I'm loving it.
Glad you like it and thanks for the suggestions. Quick question -- Can
this email be sent to et-mgmt-tools@xxxxxxxxxx? Other folks might
benefit from this discussion...
For what it's worth, here are a couple of feature suggestions
for future versions:
1. It would be nice to have a flag like "--pxe-name" when adding
systems. I'd like to be able to assign names to the hosts in
the dhcpd.conf, instead of the default "label1", "label2", etc.
Agreed. I was having this discussion yesterday on IRC (#cobbler /
irc.freenode.net)
2. This would be a lot of work, but have you thought about supporting
dnsmasq as an alternative to the ISC dhcpd? Dnsmasq is nice since
it can draw its dhcpd information directly from /etc/hosts and
/etc/ethers, and it has a cacheing DNS built in. Right now,
I'm using cobbler for provisioning via dhcp/pxe, and maintaining
/etc/hosts by hand and running dnsmasq to serve up hostname resolution
from it (with dnsmasq's dhcp service turned off). It'd be great
to get rid of the duplication.
It's doable, although I am not super-familiar with dnsmasq. A couple
of options:
(1) You turn off manage_dhcp in /var/lib/cobbler/settings, and use the
trigger script infrastructure (think "plugins", they're mentioned in
the manpage) and write a quick extension using the cobbler API to
update dnsmasq when new cobbler systems are added/removed. Trigger
scripts are just executable scripts in /var/lib/cobbler/triggers that
get called with the name of the object being added. If written in
Python, using the cobbler API to mine the rest of the system info (such
as the value for a --pxe-name parameter) is fairly easy.
(2) You can submit a patch to cobbler's api_sync mode, to accept both
modes of dealing with dhcp. I would probably have to tweak it just a
little bit, but that would be a great start. Ideally the choice of
servers would be in /var/lib/cobbler/settings, to switch between approaches.
(3) You can send me an example script of how you are configuring
dnsmasq today, and I can possibly incorporate something similar into
cobbler.
Some other folks are exploring dynamic DNS integration and possible
tie-ins with omshell/OMAPI but I think this could be more interesting.
I would like to do some exploration myself and see where this goes.
Generally this looks like it would be best
implemented as a trigger, and someone could choose whether or not to
install it -- possibly something that could be shipped in a "contrib"
directory.
If you'd like to forward this to et-mgmt-tools@xxxxxxxxxx that would be
great -- I'm sure other users have input on this as well.
Thanks,
Michael
Bryan
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