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

[Matt S Unix Administrator]

Michael DeHaan wrote:
> 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
>
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You can create submenus which contain whatever options perhaps distros
or some delimiter could define what should constitute a menu item.

The default could contain:

menu label Windows
        kernel menu.c32
        append windows.conf

menu label Linux
        kernel menu.c32
        append linux.conf