Michael DeHaan wrote:
I'm not sure we should add this. Discussion is welcome.
Thanks for the chance to discuss this. In re-reading this before
sending it, I realize that it is longer and "preachy-er" than I had
hoped. Please forgive my weak writing skills.
Within Red Hat Support we have a need for a single tool that can do
kickstart based installs, of either actual hardware or virtual
machines. For each issue that comes in (that isn't solvable by just
looking at the case), we need to do some sort of local reproduction of
the issue, if that's possible. This happens several times a week, if
not more, for each engineer working cases within support. As you know,
we support three major releases, multiple sub-configurations within
that, and our customers are often reluctant and sometimes unable to
upgrade to the latest update within a release without assurances from us
that it will solve their problem. All this is my way of emphasizing
that we can't reduce our set of possible installs to a countable,
nameable, predefined set of profiles. Each case is a new profile, and
often we must tweak that profile several times to find out exactly what
combination is needed to reproduce the problem.
While reproducablity is important, it is almost never necessary to
reproduce the customers exact hardware or virtual machine parameters.
On the other hand, it is almost always necessary to reproduce (at least
part of) the software enviroment they have.
It would be possible to use a Cobbler server in this environment. Each
engineer could manage his own Cobbler server, or we could create a
central Cobbler server, and build some tools that allowed engineers to
check in new profiles/systems, delete profile/systems, and implement
some nameing convention for profiles. But this would just be extra work
to make our environment fit the model of the typical data center
environment.
It would also be possible to use koan hardware re-installs, and
virt-install for virt installs, but it seemed useful to me to have a
single tool (with a single set of options) that did what I see as a
single function - a kickstart based install.
We could also build such a tool. We have a tool that does largely the
same thing as koan --no-cobbler --replace-self does, but does not do
--virt installs. I was looking at how to extend it to also do virt
installs, when I discovered Koan. At the time I knew that Koan was
really just an extension of Cobbler, but I was hopeing that Koan was
willing to grow into a more general kickstart-over-a-network tool, able
to use Cobbler, but not entirely dependent on it. I understand any
reluctance, or objection, to growing the purpose of Koan -- do one
thing, do it well -- is a good maxim for programs and libraries and
maybe even people, but I believe Koan can grow outside of it's current
roll of Cobbler-helper, and still be following this maxim.
While RH's support's needs are perhaps unique in the volume of
re-installs we do, I don't believe we are unique in our need for a
single tool to do kickstart based installs of either virtual or actual
hardware. Does Koan want to be that tool, to stay within it's current
role?
-gavin....
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