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

[Michael DeHaan]

Matt S Unix Administrator wrote:
> 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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>>> et-mgmt-tools at redhat.com
>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools
>>>       
>> 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
>
>
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> et-mgmt-tools at redhat.com
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>   
Excellent!  I'll check this out...