[et-mgmt-tools] Cobbler idea: PXE boot profile menu

[Michael DeHaan]

David Mackintosh wrote:
> I was about to write some wrappers to do this, but it occurs to me that
> it might be easier to do inside cobbler itself.
>
> How about instead of just having pxelinux.cfg/default kick straight into
> a hard disk boot (which is a nice, safe default) it pops up a list of the
> profiles it knows about, and will accept those names at the prompt?
>
> This would let you do one-time installs without having to generate
> a cobbler section for it.
>
> The pxelinux.cfg/default file would then look like
>
> default local
> display pxelinux-default.msg
> timeout 100
> prompt 1
>
> label local
>     localboot 0
>
> label SLES-10-std
>     kernel /images/SLES-10/vmlinuz
>     append lang ksdevice=eth0 text devfs=nomount $OTHER-THINGS
>
> [...]
>
> I would suspect for most sites there are only going to be a few profiles,
> but it probably wouldn't be too hard to write the piece which generates
> pxelinux-default.msg to put the profiles into columns for easier display.
>
> It would probably be simplest to do this inside cobbler rather than
> writing a bolt-on which figures all this out.
>
>   
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This has come up before, and it's a good idea.

One of the key issues here is that the pxelinux menus don't seem like 
they would scale very well with a very large number of profiles, so I've 
been hesitant to make that default behavior.   Honestly I'm not entirely 
aware of what happens when there are 100 profiles -- if you could figure 
this out, that would be great, and I'll implement it :)

Patches also accepted, of course.

If it's going to be done outside of Cobbler, it would basically require 
understanding /var/lib/cobbler/profiles and /var/lib/cobbler/distros, 
merging the options as appropriate, and then regenerating the file when 
sync is run.   Not too bad, really...  (note that the formats of those 
files are subject to change though, so yes, you're right in that it 
would be better if part of the cobbler tree).

--MPD