[et-mgmt-tools] Service discovery for cobbler and koan with Avahi
Michael DeHaan
mdehaan at redhat.com
Fri Aug 17 18:03:37 UTC 2007
Michael DeHaan wrote:
> I've just implemented some changes in cobbler (cobblerd) and koan that
> allow for automatic remote service discovery using Avahi.
> This allows for building of tools that rely on koan to be written in a
> way that doesn't need to be aware of where the cobbler server is,
> which is particularly useful in multi-site operations.
>
> The ultimate usage of this is the koan live CD or USB disk. Now,
> with auto-discovery enabled, we can build a truly universal installer
> image. One image can install RHEL-4, F-7, whichever -- regardless of
> your location. The live installer CD will boot in any (supported) bare
> metal machine, check the machine's MAC address, find the cobbler
> server automatically, and install whatever profile is mapped to the MAC
> address inside of cobbler. None of this requires a PXE setup,
> either -- so it's easy to set up "bonus" install servers even if your
> organization
> already has a PXE infrastructure.
>
> To use this, install cobbler and koan from source, and also install
> the avahi-tools package on both ends. That's all you need to do.
> This will be included in the 0.6.1 release, when that happens.
>
> How does this work?
>
> Cobblerd will detect the presence of avahi-tools when it starts up,
> and will publish the service.
>
> With koan, we specify --server=DISCOVER to tell koan it needs to
> probe for a cobbler server.
>
> For instance, the following command works regardless of where you are:
> koan --server=DISCOVER --list-profiles
>
> --Michael
>
>
>
>
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As someone on IRC (#cobbler on freenode.net) asked, avahi-tools is
currently available in Fedora and RHEL5.
It may be installable on RHEL4.
Either way, the tools will continue to work without it... I detect the
presense/absense of the capability at run time ...
they just won't be able to autodiscover/publish if that ability is not
there.
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