[et-mgmt-tools] Service discovery for cobbler and koan with Avahi

[Michael DeHaan]

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.