[et-mgmt-tools] re: Stupid Cobbler Trick: PXE Booting SuSE-family distributions

[Michael DeHaan]

David Mackintosh wrot

> In the spirit of using tools beyond their original intent, I figured
> out how to use cobbler to help automate setting up PXE install
> environments for SuSE-family distributions.  

> http://wiki.xdroop.com/space/Linux/SuSE/Using+Cobbler+with+SuSE

> Presumably the principles here could be extended to any Linux
> distribution.


David,

Neat stuff!

Looking over the above example it seems that if you're going interactive 
you could just leave off the kickstart parameter rather than just 
passing in a filler argument.   However, I have a suggestion that might 
be useful.  

If you pass the address of an autoyast file to --kickstart, cobbler will 
write (behind the scenes) a "ks=blah" line to the kernel command line 
parameters.   I would expect SuSE would ignore this.   However, adding a 
--kopts parameter that referenced the file (URL) given in --kickstart 
would seemingly allow passing in a SuSE answer file.   Cobbler really 
doesn't know what a kickstart is, technically, it's just a file to which 
some templating voodoo can be applied, so that might be possible.    
 From http://www.suse.com/~ug/AutoYaST_FAQ.html it appears this 
parameter is just "autoyast=" instead of "ks=", so that's pretty 
simple.   This would work today.

Unfortunately I have no experience generating AutoYAST files, though it 
appears there are GUI tools to help with this. 

One thing that comes to mind (for a new feature) is having a parameter 
on "distro" that would accomodate various breeds of distros, such that 
minor distribution tweaks could be made.

Example:

cobbler distro add --name=foo --distro=blah --kernel=blah --breed=suse

Obviously breed would default to kickstartable RH/Fedora-based distros.

I'd need someone to volunteer to do some SuSE testing though.  Don't 
have any machines here :)

Thoughts?

Thanks for pointing out that this is doable.    I really like the idea 
of making cobbler a bit more versatile.

--Michael