[et-mgmt-tools] changing webdir and ks config file locations in 0.6.0

[Michael DeHaan]

Tom Georgoulias wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm new to this list and just started working to replace our current 
> RHEL3 provisioning system with cobbler on RHEL5.  So far so good.  :)
>
> I need a sanity check, though:  I wanted to change the default file 
> locations for the webdir and kickstart config files ( currently 
> /var/www/cobbler and /etc/cobbler/*) during the RPM install and found 
> myself making so many changes to the source code files that I ended up 
> requiring a patch for the RPM and lots of edits to cobbler.spec. 
> Getting the webdir filepath changed required me to edit these files:
>
> setup.py
> config/cobbler.conf
> scripts/findks.cgi
> scripts/nopxe.cgi
> cobbler/settings.py

There are some places though (koan, templates, etc) that assume some 
relative http structure exists -- so I'd caution against moving the web 
dir.  A better question would be, why do you want to move the webdir?

If it is to conserve space, you can use "--available-as" on the cobbler 
import to specify that the URLs you import are available externally and 
do not need to be mirrored.  Then the content to be kept on the cobbler 
server would be fairly minimal.   It's true that the yum mirroring 
support doesn't really know about this yet, which brings me to option 2...

Another option would be to make /var/www/cobbler (or even /var/www) a 
symlink to a directory on another partition/volume -- or an NFS mount 
point.  Be careful though, NFS + symlinks + Apache + SELinux can require 
a bit of hoop jumping.    (You can use mount with a security context 
instead).

The templates files in /etc can probably stay there.   If you want to 
add some more, you can path them anywhere you want and don't have to use 
those.   Those templates are just starter ideas :)

Syntax for changing what template a profile uses:

cobbler profile edit --name=foo 
--kickstart=/opt/special/mykickstarts/x.ks   # etc

Hopefully that makes sense, if not, maybe you can elaborate a bit on why 
you wanted to move things around?

--Michael