[et-mgmt-tools] Cobbler usage survey / needs

[Michael DeHaan]

Two fold email:

Cobbler's reached a point where are there places I _could_ take it, 
though I'm trying to figure out which are the most important.    If 
there's any features that you would really like to have related to 
provisioning/kickstart/etc, I'd like to hear about them.    There is a 
rough list I've been keeping at:

http://hg.et.redhat.com/hg/emd/applications/cobbler?f=d9209042c5d6;file=TODO

As far as big ticket items, I like the idea of serving kickstarts 
through a custom webserver and logging kickstart activity (and being 
able to tell a box to always ask if it should netboot but to kickstart 
only when configured to do so), though maybe that's just me thinking of 
things to do and not things people really need.   I also keep coming 
back to the thought that "sync" should only update things it needs to 
update, to save on copying -- though it may not be that anyone has 600 
distributions in Cobbler as I've added during testing :)  Other ideas 
for upgrades and brainstorming are welcome.

I'm also curious as to how Cobbler is being used in the wild.   I know 
the PXE pieces are being leveraged, but how many folks are using it for 
Xen?   Is anyone using it to reprovision via "enchant" or is koan being 
executed directly?   How about "import"?  How many machines and profiles 
are involved in your cobbler deployments, or are you just testing with 
it?   Are the kickstart templating features sufficient?    Basically any 
info on how you are using it and ways in which it could be improved to 
better solve real world provisioning problems in various environments 
would be greatly appreciated.   If folks would rather reply personally 
than to list, that's fine too.

Thanks!

--Michael