[et-mgmt-tools] Starting from scratch... where does one start.

[David Lutterkort]

On Thu, 2007-01-25 at 21:52 -0700, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> So I am wanting to play with the various et tools with our RHEL
> systems (spanning from 2.1 to 4). I can see that cobbler would be used
> to help provision systems from a PXE boot line, and I would like to be
> able to use prm and cft to 'kickstart' our automated configuration
> environment... but I would like to get an idea of what the developers
> see as how these 'should' be put together before I go down a lot of
> blind alleys.  So if someone is starting from scratch in building an
> enterprise environment.. where to begin :).

That's a very good question, and we haven't really expressed how this
wil all fit together.

I think the two things you want to familiarize yourself is (1) cobbler
and (2) puppet; which one you want to start using first depends a little
on what you see as your most urgent need: provisioning or getting a
handle on config management. Eventually, you'd want to run both,
probably on the same machine, and kickstart your boxes into a basic
setup and have puppet give it a 'persona' (I attach a sample kickstart
file that I use to kickstart my fc6 boxes that way; it'll also work with
rhel5, but with older releases you need to jump through a couple of
hoops to install puppet from FE in %post)

Cft and prm are both a little rough still; prm (or the larger question
of distributing config bits) needs some love, especially in the context
of virtual appliances. I am in the process of defining best practices
around organizing your config server (discussions on the puppet-users
list) to make distribution cleaner and easier.

You should be able to use cft by itself right now; it's at a very early
stage, but already pretty useful for simple config tweaks.

I would love to hear more about your ideas/expectations/experiences
creating an infrastructure with these tools. And of course any questions
you have.

David

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# DomU kickstart with puppet install
# Installs 147 packages / 590MB
# Tested with FC6

# The machine running the puppetmaster must be called 'puppet'

install
reboot
url --url URL_TO_INSTALL_TREE
repo --name=extras --baseurl=URL_TO_EXTRAS_REPO

lang en_US.UTF-8
keyboard us
xconfig --driver "fbdev" --resolution 800x600 --depth 24
network --device eth0 --bootproto dhcp
rootpw --iscrypted YOUR_ROOT_PASSWD_HERE
firewall --enabled --port=22:tcp
authconfig --enableshadow --enablemd5
selinux --enforcing
timezone --utc America/Los_Angeles
bootloader --location=mbr --driveorder=xvda --append="rhgb quiet"

clearpart --all --initlabel --drives=xvda
part /boot --fstype ext3 --size=100 --ondisk=xvda
part pv.2 --size=0 --grow --ondisk=xvda
volgroup domu --pesize=32768 pv.2
logvol / --fstype ext3 --name=lv00 --vgname=domu --size=1024 --grow
logvol swap --fstype swap --name=lv01 --vgname=domu --size=272 --grow --maxsize=544

%packages --nobase
crontabs
dhclient
dhcpv6_client
nfs-utils
openssh-clients
openssh-server
yum
puppet

%post --nochroot
exec > /mnt/sysimage/root/post-nochroot.txt 2>&1
test -f /tmp/netinfo && cp /tmp/netinfo /mnt/sysimage/tmp/

%post
exec > /root/post.txt 2>&1
/sbin/chkconfig --level 345 puppet on
# Figure out the FQDN
if [ -f /tmp/netinfo ] ; then
  FQDN=`(source /tmp/netinfo; [ -n "$DOMAIN" ] && echo $HOSTNAME.$DOMAIN || echo $HOSTNAME)`
  hostname $FQDN
  /usr/sbin/puppetd -o -v --waitforcert 600
fi