[et-mgmt-tools] Alternative storage backends for Cobbler / other features

[Michael DeHaan]

So there's been a lot of interest around having Cobbler read LDAP 
recently, and possibly I'm guessing it would be useful to have it 
/write/ to LDAP.  I know several
folks already have their own scripts to interface between the two.

I'm thinking about abstracting the serializer code to allow for configs 
in arbitrary formats, though the existing YAML will be the default
and will not require any configuration for existing installs -- or new 
ones.   I will not taking your non-XML human-readable config files away 
from you :)
Anyhow, the serializer stuff is already somewhat modular so I don't 
expect this to be terribly complicated.  The hard part will be 
engineering things to not
need to worry about schema upgrades.

The DB options are mainly to keep queries fast as we scale up into 
thousands of system records.  Future scaling work may also (probably) 
imply looking more towards OMAPI when dealing with ISC's dhcp.conf 
versus having to template out the file.   If someone things that is 
needed (or even better, would like to work on that), please speak up.

Most likely what would happen is I'll implement the framework for 
allowing arbitrary formats with a sqlite prototype, and if someone else 
wants to add
in LDAP later that would be pretty easy to do by following the sqlite 
module's lead.

The other thing on the radar is finally making the XMLRPC API 
bi-directional (by adding an additional secure version on another port) 
to make the life of webapps using the Cobbler API easier.  I've been 
meaning to do that for a while.   Until then apps that need write access 
to cobbler configs can go through the python API and/or the YAML tree.

There was also a great suggestion about giving koan a very basic 
--register function, that would add an entry in the cobbler DB that 
tells the admin that he needs to set the system up.   It would fill in 
the MAC, IP, and the hostname -- but that's it.   This is probably going 
to be a bit further down the pipe than the above but it would be useful for
cases where taking manual inventory of all the MACs in a datacenter 
would be a bit painful.   We already have most of the code to do this 
from virt-factory, in fact, and we
can add this into the existing Cobbler API.

Comments?  Questions?    Ideas?

--Michael