This is a great feature! Thanks for putting the work in on this. I am working on the apache lockdown items for my organization and look forward to building a "Live Provisioning CD" that meets our requirements.
Thanks again!
Yours,
Aaron
On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Michael DeHaan <mdehaan@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
For a while Cobbler has had a solution based on koan and the live CD to enable network provisioning of bare metal in environments that either do not have DHCP, or do not have control over DHCP that is sufficient enough to set up a PXE environment. Naturally, if you can set up a PXE environment with Cobbler, it's very useful to have, and you'll want it.
So, along came the live CD.
The live CD was built using a recent Fedora, and it had the magic ability to install any distro -- /except/ you had to use Fedora to build the Live CD, and the build process was slow, and the live image was a bit bigger than it needed to be. However, due to driver constraints, it didn't always support the latest in storage technology -- that was a problem.
We have finally implemented the low-tech solution, thanks to various folks in Red Hat GPS, and some hacking I've done to integrate that closer into cobbler.
Using 0.9.X or later (it's checked in now into the git "devel" branch) you can do:
cobbler buildiso [--iso=] [--tempdir=] [--profiles=]
This will automatically generate an ISO that allows for menus just like Cobbler's PXE boot menus, for installing new systems. I also plan to allow a configurable default profile for those who want to mass deploy this image using remote management processors, etc.
The menu will contain an entry for each bare metal bootable profile, with the current data set in Cobbler. Given that Cobbler now generates kickstarts in real time, changes to the kickstart templates can be made without reburning the CD!
Again, the live CD is more dynamic, but this is much smaller, faster, and easier to build.
The one thing the live CD still offers is simulation of the MAC address detection feature of PXE, but if you don't need to use cobbler system records to provision your lab/datacenter/etc, this will also get you there -- and is probably the perfect fit if the Live CD was not working out for you.
Test release will be available soon, git is available now.
--Michael
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