[et-mgmt-tools] Cobbler 0.3.4-1 comments

[David Mackintosh]

Hi there,

I've just done a moderate sized cobbler installation (currently
twelve distros with more to come, eventually more than a hundred
systems) and have a few comments based on what I have seen so far. 
These are probably minor quibbles.  

This is installed from the 0.3.4-1.src.rpm 

1.  Cobbler doesn't appear to understand -v, -V, or --version

...which isn't entirely necessary if it is installed from rpm
(rpm -qa | grep cobbler gets me the info I needed) but it would
still be nice.

2.  Brief output should at least be an option, if not a default.

I want the equivilent of 

# cobbler list --profiles | grep profile

...since the vast majority of the time I don't care about the details
of a profile, I only want to see the list of names because I have so
many of them I've forgotten what I called the one I want.  Yes this
is mostly my fault for frequently forgetting/changing my "standards"
but it would be nice if the tool could help.

3.  Semantically, since cobbler uses

# cobbler system add [...]

...cobbler should therefore understand

# cobbler system list

...instead of requiring

# cobbler list --systems

I have nothing against the latter, but the former fits more
semantically into the COMMAND OBJECT ACTION model I like to use. 
Perhaps this form of the command would be a good place to put the
brief output.  

Or maybe you want to change the other commands to the form

# cobbler add --system

...but either way it should be more consistant.

4.  Sorted output would be nice.

The output of the various lists are not sorted by either order-added
or some kind of alpha-numerical sort; either would be adequate, and
the latter obviously preferred.

One could even argue that since the "index" of a profile/distro/name
which preceeds the name will probably change as other things are
added and removed, and are not used anywhere (ie you can't refer to a
profile as "profile #3" anywhere) it should be dropped entirely from
the output.  

5.  Unless I misunderstand something, if I define my profiles with
    URLs to ks.cfg files instead of file references, there is nothing
    served through httpd by cobbler.  In this case it would be nice
    if cobbler didn't restart my httpd every time I ran cobbler sync.

6.  If manage_dhcp is set to 0, cobbler check should not complain
    about missing dhcpd pieces.

In my case dhcpd is on another system under another set of script's
control, so cobbler needn't be bothered about those details.  Maybe
an option to tell it not to warn about those kinds of things would
be in order (squelch_dhcp_warnings or something).

END COMMENTS

All that said, these are exceedingly minor quibbles.  Cobbler has
already saved me a ton of time and made me look good in front of two
moderately-sized customers (always a plus).  

I do have a question about the implementation -- is there anything
that would prevent cobbler from running on, say, a Solaris system?  I
ask because I already have a fairly extensive host-management system
set up that runs on Solaris, and it would be reasonably
straight-forward to integrate cobbler into it so that a user could
say 

# need_shoes --system="text-name" --profile="profile-name"

(ie need_shoes asks the cobbler for boots, or maybe you'd name it after
a shoe vendor or something... to beat a naming convention to death :)

...and have that script dig the IP address and MAC out of NIS, doctor
dhcpd (if necessary -- I'm already doing much of that, which is why in
my past comments I was resistant to cobbler doing it as well), and
do the final "cobbler sync" automatically, making it a one-stop for
my administrators.

A second question -- while thinking about #5 above, it occured to me
that I don't immediately understand why cobbler copies the vmlinuz
and initrd.img files into the httpd tree.  Why do you do that?

Thanks again for cobbler.

-- 
 /\oo/\
/ /()\ \ David Mackintosh | 
         dave at xdroop.com  | http://www.xdroop.com
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