[et-mgmt-tools] Kickstart tracking in 0.3.6

[Michael DeHaan]

Ok, kickstart tracking is implemented and pushed, so if anyone wants to 
play with this, please check out the Mercurial repository.   Just run a 
"cobbler sync" after the upgrade to get Apache configured correctly.   I 
probably won't release this (along with the rest of 0.3.6) until 
mid-next week.   Manpage docs have to be written first :)

In order to see when machines have truly finished, the kickstart files 
need to contain the following somewhere in post:
%post
TEMPLATE::kickstart_done

I have updated the default kickstarts that come with cobbler, so you can 
see what is done there.  

And then, at any time, one can run the following and see following for 
all distros in their system:

[root at mdehaan cobbler]# cobbler status
Address              | State           | Started                   | 
Last Request              | Seconds    | File Count
172.16.56.91         | notdone         | Thu Jan  4 16:23:16 2007  | Thu 
Jan  4 17:13:32 2007  | 3016       | 1422 

Individual status of files transferred is stored in 
/var/log/cobbler/kicklog/$IPADDR.   Right now, these files are not 
pruned, though in future versions I might decide to delete them if they 
haven't been modified in 30 days, or something like that.    This really 
shouldn't be a problem as the files won't be huge.

If you're using kickstart trees on another partition, you'll only see a 
few files transferred, if at all, and will have less resolution into 
kickstart status.  To fix this, just create a symlink to 
/var/www/cobbler/localmirror/$foo for each kickstart tree $foo you have, 
and provision from http://$server/cobbler_track/localmirror/$foo as 
source URL in the kickstart.     The "track" in the URL is a bit of 
magic, and if you're using "cobbler import" that will be done 
automatically for you. 

As usual, this feature can be ignored for those that don't need to 
understand it.   It will still be there, though :)

For all those with suggestions (or better, patches) to improve the 
tracking information, those are definitely welcome.  I intend to add 
some YAML and/or XML output in the future to supplement the existing 
command.  (i.e. "cobbler status --mode=yaml").

--Michael



Michael DeHaan wrote:
> Friendly Neighborhood Cobbler Users,
>
> One of the things I've wanted to do with cobbler for some time was be 
> able to keep track of systems as they kickstart, so that higher level 
> applications and scripts could, if they wanted, try to detect which 
> machines had stalled or otherwise failed to complete.    Some 
> rudimentary support for this is going into upstream now, and I'll be 
> refining it some more over the next few days.
>
> How does it work?
>
> Well, it only works for kickstart trees that come out of 
> /var/www/cobbler -- local content -- so if you're installing off of a 
> Fedora mirror, this gives you more reason to let Cobbler mirror that 
> distro and serve it locally (plus, it's nicer to the guy running the 
> mirror).   This means kickstart tracking will work for any distros 
> that have been pulled down via "cobbler import" or any distributions 
> you have created yourself in that directory 
> (/var/www/cobbler/localmirror/foo is the preferred destination for 
> such content).   If you already have a kickstart tree elsewhere, 
> symlinking it should be good enough if you configure Apache 
> appropriately.
>
> So, how it works -- this new release installs a mod_python filter 
> handler automagically for /var/www/cobbler, and access to certain 
> files in that directory are logged with the IP address of the 
> requester, the time, and the file requested.    From this, it is 
> possible to tell what profiles are being requested, what RPM's they've 
> requested, and when they are done (they request a special filename at 
> the bottom of their kickstarts when they are done).   This all 
> currently goes into /var/log/cobbler/cobbler.log and there is a 
> logrotate script in /etc/logrotate.d that keeps the logfile 
> manageable.   This is all done from the RPM basically, so there isn't 
> any added pain on the user.
>
> This will probably require some more advanced tools to understand the 
> logfiles and report on the status of the kickstarts.   Some things 
> this tool might need to look at would be things like produce reports 
> that provide information such as "this machine hasn't requested an 
> file in 30 minutes and is not yet finished" and so on.
>
> If anybody is already doing this sort of thing, or has ideas on what 
> sort of form factor reporting tools should take, I'd love to hear your 
> opinion.   I may end up keeping the log data itself as YAML, so that 
> it is more easily read back by cobbler to produce a report.
>
> Imagine:
>
> cobbler showkickstarting
>
> 192.168.1.10         IN PROGRESS | 50 rpms requested |  35 minutes 
> elapsed 192.168.1.11         FINISHED | 250 rpms requested | 55 
> minutes elapsed
> 192.168.1.12         STALLED?  |  15 rpms requested | 250 minutes elapsed
>
> and so on.
>
> Comments?
>
> --Michael
>
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