[et-mgmt-tools] Old Stuff Needs To Work Too: Lilo compatibility / Koan and RHEL3

[Michael DeHaan]

Michael DeHaan wrote:
> Two things:
>
> ===
>
> One.
>
> Koan had some lilo support before, though I've discovered a few things 
> about it recently, and they are now fixed in mercurial.
>
> So, if you were playing with koan before (either via "cobbler 
> enchant/transmogrify" or directly ("koan --replace-self") and had 
> systems using lilo, they will be a lot happier now.    Changes are 
> available in hg and will probably be pushed out to Fedora sometime 
> next week.  (Cobbler 0.3.4, Koan 0.2.5)
>
> Lilo changes:
>
> (1)  Before, one had to run lilo manually after running koan to apply 
> the config.   Koan now does this automagically if lilo is being used 
> as the bootloader.
>
> (2)  It turns out that Lilo can't deal with multiple boot images 
> having the same display value (ex: "kickstart" and "kickstart"), so if 
> you run koan multiple times by accident, you're out of luck.  Now they 
> are labelled as "kick%s" where %s is the number of seconds since epoch 
> (Jan 1, 1970).   I had limited space to work with :)
>
> (3)  while koan would correctly modify the lilo or grub config based 
> on what was installed, it got confused if both grub and lilo were 
> installed, and would only edit grub, even if lilo was the active 
> bootloader.  It now probes to see which bootloader is active and 
> modifies the correct one.
>
> ===
>
> Two.
>
> The other thing I'm going to be doing shortly is making koan 
> compilable with RHEL3 -- some users don't have PXE setups (cobbler can 
> provision RHEL3 via PXE fine), and currently koan and "enchant" won't 
> work for them there.   So, when this gets done, Cobbler will support 
> RHEL4+, derivatives, and FC5+ -- and koan will support all of that 
> with the addition of RHEL 3.   Obviously, no virtualization support on 
> RHEL 3...
>
> --Michael
>
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Much to my suprise, it turns out that koan works on RHEL3 out of the 
box.   After the release of koan 0.2.5 and cobbler 0.3.4 (which is going 
to happen today, now that this already works), I'll add RHEL3 to the 
"supported" list for things that can run koan.   If anyone would like to 
test Centos 3 with koan's existing noarch RPM, be my guest.    Just do a 
"rpm -i koan*.rpm --force --nodeps".

I did modify the python manifest file so koan can be built _on_ RHEL3, 
and this is part of 0.2.5.