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

[Michael DeHaan]

Michael DeHaan wrote:
> 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
>
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I've pushed the above --breed option to the Mercurial repo.

 > hg clone http://hg.et.redhat.com/hg/emd/applications/cobbler cobbler

Testing from SuSE users would be great.   Note that this only covers PXE 
at the moment.  I do not forsee koan --replace-self ever supporting 
alternative breeds (the code is rather RH specific and I don't have much 
time to keep those other distros working), though this may come into 
play for use with Xen and other things that libvirt will come to 
support.   Of course if someone is interested in getting that running, 
patches are accepted.   The same goes for porting koan to other distros.

--Michael