Hi folks,
Cobbler 0.5.0 was building up in terms of features and it's time to do a
release. This release is a testing release, as indicated by Cobbler
having an odd number.
Things are expected to work well, and I've done some testing, though
caution when playing around on a production box is advisable -- there's
a lot of new stuff here.
(The biggest change is the support for inheritance in profiles and this
affects the sync code a good bit).
For this release, koan needs to be updated to take advantage of changes
in cobbler. Basically, cobblerd is now written in Cobbler's own API,
and we have
less dependency on YAML. Removing this sort of thing required changes
on both sides of the fence.
I will push this to F7-testing's yum repository, shortly, and barring
any major noise, F-7 stable and FC-6 will follow.
---
The main changes in cobbler are:
* Cobbler systems can be named anything. If you want to name them
"blippy", this works. If using arbitrary labels, specify the mac with
--mac or the ip with --ip.
One or the other is required to make a PXE-able configuration, though
koan doesn't need either. If you name a system the old way (after the
MAC address), cobbler
will fill in the value for --mac automatically, as you would expect.
* You can now say things like "cobbler system report FOO" to get the
properties of just that one system.
* Optionally use dnsmasq for DHCP (and DNS!) instead of ISC
dhcpd. You'll need to reload (SIGHUP) dnsmasq peridocally or run
cobbler sync to make changes made in Cobbler apply to the outside
world. This works very well and is quite easy to configure. See the
manpage for more details.
* Cobbler system add also takes a --hostname. If manage_dhcp is
enabled, and using dnsmasq, this has real meaning. If not, it's just
a metadata variable to use in templating.
* Triggers are restructed. There are now "pre" and "post" triggers.
/var/lib/cobbler/triggers/(add/delete)/(distro|profile|system|repo)/(pre|post)/*.sh
Pre-triggers run before an object is added, post-triggers run
afterwards. Triggers are also now validating. If a pre trigger
returns non-zero, it can cancel the creation of a cobbler object.
Older docs http://et.redhat.com/page/Cobbler_Triggers will be updated
shortly.
* Patch to allow --createrepo-flags and to cache on import. Multiple
calls to createrepo have been removed.
* Various modifications to allow for profile inheritance. See the
manpage or my earlier email to the list for details.
Basically:
cobbler profile add --name=foo --distro=bar --param1=...
cobbler profile add --name=foo2 --inherit=foo --param2=...
- All variables in object tree now available for use in templating
This means that if you pass in a value to --virt-ram, in the kickstart
template, you can actually reference $virt-ram as a templating variable,
automagically.
This works for all variables.
- Optional override of --kickstart in system object
I'm not sure of a great reason for this, though there have been some
requests. If you have a system object and want to use a slightly
tweaked kickstart file,
you can now do so. It's still recommended to use templating instead,
however.
Koan has only changed in order to support Cobbler 0.5.0, including the
ability to name systems in cobbler after things that are not MAC addresses.
--virt-name still works as an override in koan, though if you do a
"cobbler system add --name=foo" and a "koan --virt --system=foo
--server=...", the virtual
system you install will be named, as expected, "foo".
-----
Updates can be found here: http://cobbler.et.redhat.com/download
Comments/questions welcome.
Thanks!
--Michael
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