[et-mgmt-tools] Cobbler + %pre and %post in kickstart

[Mike M]

Hello,

I'm curious to know how people deal with pre-install steps like
configuring hardware RAID arrays, or post-install things like
installing server-specific non-Red Hat packages, system setting
tweaks, etc, during kickstart.  Is kickstart's %pre and %post the best
way to do this, or does Cobbler have anything up its sleeve to do this
differently?  It seems like profiles or even perhaps triggers could be
useful, but I'm not quite sure what the best way to accomplish this
would be.

To illustrate my point, say I have 100 Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers all
requiring the same base Red Hat ES 4 installation:  50 need to be
configured with hardware RAID 5 and Apache installed in addition to
the base OS, 30 need to be configured with hardrware RAID 10 and
MySQL, and 20 need to be configured with hardware RAID 1 and
Webalizer.  Obviously, I don't want to manually configure the RAID
arrays prior to provisioning them if I can avoid it.  Provided Dell
has a tool that runs under linux that can configure the hardware RAID
controller *and* I can associate a MAC address to a required RAID
config and additional packages, what is the best way to do both the
pre-install and the post-install steps?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Mike