Michael DeHaan wrote:
Peter Wright wrote:
> David Lutterkort wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, 2007-08-17 at 13:53 -0400, Michael DeHaan wrote:
>> > How does this work?
>> >
>> > Cobblerd will detect the presence of avahi-tools when it starts
>> up,
>> > and will publish the service.
>> >
>> > With koan, we specify --server=DISCOVER to tell koan it needs to
>> > probe for a cobbler server.
>> >
>> > For instance, the following command works regardless of where you
are:
>> > > koan --server=DISCOVER --list-profiles
>>
>> Cool .. how about the following behavior: when koan is started without
>> --server, it first tries to look up a host named 'cobbler' and uses
that
>> as the cobblerd; if no such host exists, try to discover using
avahi; if
>> that fails tell the user they are dumb and need to give na explicit
>> server with --server ?
>>
> please do not put any hard coded hostnames in the koan code base. two
> immediate problems crop to mind:
>
> 1) a host named cobbler already exists and does not run cobblerd
> 2) the system becomes coupled to a working DNS system
>
>
> -p
>
>
>
Peter,
I'm not so sure I agree a few defaults is a bad thing, since it's pretty
easy to test for cobblerd's presence (xmlrpc responding to certain
method on certain port) and we wouldn't have to engage this check unless
--server was omitted. David's suggestion actually works pretty well to
help out those running EL4 boot servers (where there is no Avahi) --
which is probably the most likely platform for a boot server at this
point. Rest assured I have ruled out "nmap" as a discovery method :)
And obviously if we specify --server (as was mandatory before) we can
skip all of those checks (so you don't need DNS in that case).
--Michael
OK, I guess I understand the reasoning here - although I get a little
worried when hostnames are hard coded into applications like this, I
rarely like outside forces determining naming schemes :)
I'd feel more comfortable if koan looked for a COBBLER_SERVER
environment variable (or something similar) to get the name of the
master cobbler node on ones network, or subnet. Maybe this variable
could be taken as an override of the default "cobbler" hostname.
Assuming that koan is going to be called via shell scripts or some other
programmatic method in most environments this would also help admins who
may need to rename machines or test code against development/staging
cobbler servers. maybe i'm off base in this assumption though.
I've got my anal retentive admin hat on today so take this with a grain
of salt ;)
-p
--
Peter Wright
Systems Administrator
Sony Pictures Imageworks
wright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
www.imageworks.com
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