These are two things I want to look at doing soon.
(A)
The image use case:
We're already using Cobbler to help manage DHCP, DNS, PXE trees, and
abstract out all of the glue that holds the OS's together. One thing
that it doesn't do though, is have a good way to deploy images to
physical machines (cloning). Kickstart is pretty flexible, I like it
better, but I know that doesn't solve all the problems of deploying
"that other OS" and so forth. Images are also important for the
appliance space, and we'll also be able to eventually use the same kind
of image database for virt images depending on how we play our cards.
So, since things like udpcast allow network deployment of the "target"
boot image, this seems like it would be easy to do something like.
cobbler system add --name=foo --clone=this-image-target # syntax
completely made up at this point
And have that system then netboot the "reciever" image. (This seems
to indicate you can't clone two different images at the same time, but
maybe the reciever has options for that? Hmmm... that would be nice).
Cobbler could manage the TFTP tree for something like updcast pretty
easily as well as kicking off the right sender commands and organizing
the images.
We could also do things like "cobbler image add" to maintain the list of
images and have them easily assignable/browseable in the Web app.
(B)
Power management.
Do something with FreeIPMI / OpenIPMI (I haven't investigated either of
these in depth yet -- there may be alternatives), so that when assigning
a new profile to a system record it is then trivial to also power cycle
that system. This would make PXE reinstallations easier (especially
where you can't SSH in to restart them) and also would help cobbler
become more of a tool for managing the low level system bits.
Does anyone care to share any of their favorite open source tools,
scripts, and ideas for dealing with either of the above? It would be
nice to have some things that were similar to what folks were already
using, and that also means more help in testing and that we're doing the
right thing.
--Michael
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