[et-mgmt-tools] multi-os howto?

[Dhawal Doshy]

Michael DeHaan wrote:
>> Dhawal Doshy wrote:
>>> Hello Michael and List,
>>>
>>> i recently started testing cobbler for my setup and quite like the ease
>>> of provisioning.
[SNIP]
>>> However each of these creates a /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/distro and not
>>> /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default. In the production setup i have the
>>> 'default' file being updated manually with different labels to support
>>> multiple OSes.. and a Display file to present the options at the boot:
>>> prompt.
>>>
>>> My question is how do it do this using cobbler?
> 
> If you are interested, cobbler can keep a MAC address database in 
> cobbler so the systems will PXE boot to what they are supposed to be 
> when they do not have an OS on them, based on the MAC address.    This 
> makes the defaults file unneccessary.
> 
> cobbler system add --name=AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:EE --profile=fc5i386dbserver
> cobbler system add --name=AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF --profile=fc5i386webserver

I tried that for a test case.. but in most cases we are not aware of the 
MAC address till the system boots up (when its already too late and time 
consuming to note it down and create a system tailored for it).. hence 
our need for the 'default' thingy in pxelinux.cfg

> I will definitely add the menus though as that appears to be a very 
> common hosting use case.

That'll be nice..

> OT, but I would also suggest starting to reference your kickstart files 
> on the local system (i.e. --kickstart=/path/to/file) as that way you can 
> start taking advantage of cobbler's kickstart templating features should 
> you want to use them later.   However what you are doing is fine if you 
> don't need that just yet.

We might need templating of the kickstart file (if i understand the 
concept correctly) since we offer a host of pre-configured servers (mx, 
smtp, delivery, web, database etc..) with standard and custom partitioning.

> As for Ubuntu, it's pretty cool to see this:  
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KickstartCompatibility, which seems to 
> imply you can do fully automatic installs from Cobbler without changing 
> anything.   Awesome.

cool.. once we are done with a functional setup of cobbler, we intend on 
taking up koan as well (just for kicks).. though we rarely re-provision 
a server and virtualization is still not explored completely.

- dhawal