Hi, I hope this won't seem like a selfish request, I'll just try to explain how cobbler and koan could much better fit my needs, and possibly those of others! My setup : I run Xen PV guests. LOTS of them. What I do to ease their management is use unpartitioned LVM logical volumes from the host as block devices, one for "/" and the other for swap. I don't let any tools create the guest config files, I create them myself "by hand" once, then deploy them through an rpm package to all the Xen hosts I have available. This way I have a central location to check for all guest configuration and MAC addresses. The initial guest install is where I'd like to use cobbler and koan in order to save time. I currently extract and modify a pre-existing RHEL5 install, but that's another story ;-) Problem : Koan wants to create the Xen guest configuration files for me. I'd like it to be able to use an existing file and have koan extract the settings it needs from there. Here is an example Xen guest config file I use : --- # Xen Configuration File name = "cobbler" memory = "512" maxmem = "512" disk = [ 'phy:/dev/data/cobbler,xvda,w', 'phy:/dev/data/swapcobbler,xvdb,w' ] vif = [ 'mac=00:16:3e:5f:76:6e, bridge=xenbr0', 'mac=00:16:3e:5f:76:6f, bridge=xenbr1' ] uuid = '5f766eef-8cf3-c287-1635-115e103561d0' bootloader = '/usr/bin/pygrub' vcpus = 2 on_reboot = 'restart' on_crash = 'restart' --- I generate the uuid myself (md5sum of the full host name), then use the 6 first characters in the eth0 mac address, increment it for the eth1 mac address. Ideally, I'd like to be able to tell koan to use this existing "cobbler" file and use xenbr1 for everything it needs to do (since dhcpd and cobbler are only listening on that "private" network), then wait, and get a working "cobbler" system up and running :-) Is this something that could be achieved? Am I the only one to have multiple block devices, multiple network interfaces, and like having fixed MAC addresses for my Xen guests? Currently, koan might be useful to me, but once I get the guest running, I'd still need to move stuff around block devices and change bits and pieces of configuration to get things into place as I want them. Matthias -- Clean custom Red Hat Linux rpm packages : http://freshrpms.net/ Fedora release 7 (Moonshine) - Linux kernel 2.6.22.6-81.fc7 Load : 0.42 0.44 0.97 _______________________________________________ et-mgmt-tools mailing list et-mgmt-tools@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools