[et-mgmt-tools] cobbler system add

[Michael DeHaan]

drew einhorn wrote:
> I'm using cobbler on a VMware ESX server.
>
> For now, I'm creating VMs by hand using the vmware gui client.
>
> When I power them up they PXE boot, I type menu and choose a profile.
> Was hoping I could nail down the ip to the mac in %post
>
> I have been reluctant to manually dig into PM to find mac
> address and manually make a dhcp reservation.
This wouldn't be required to pick the MAC and avoid the menu altogether.  

All that requires is a cobbler system entry for the new machine
with the right mac addr and profile assignment.   This creates an entry 
in /tftpboot that the machine would find.
Though maybe I'm misunderstanding the problem...

>
> I'm looking into the VMperl API.  VMware is calling it a legacy API.
> Don't know how much longer they will support it.
>
> I think it won't be too difficult to use VMperl to create scripts to
> make an appropriate dhcp reservations, or create a VM to order.
> Will let you know when I have something more concrete than plans.
Excellent.
>
> There's a new VI Perl SDK Beta.  Haven't looked at the .exe
> I downloaded.  Haven't found a Linux version.
Hopefully that is just an installer and it's all web services driven.   
AFAIK, VMware is supposed
to have a WSDL interface.  SOAP isn't as clean (or simple) as XMLRPC, 
but it'll work better
than nothing :)
>
> Have a vague recollection of a version issue with dnsmasq
> on my platform, CentOS5, but that could be my imagination,
> need to look at this again.
>
> Drew
>
> On 7/30/07, *Michael DeHaan* <mdehaan at redhat.com 
> <mailto:mdehaan at redhat.com>> wrote:
>
>     drew einhorn wrote:
>     > Near the end of %post I issued a cobbler system add command
>     > to bind the dynamically assigned ip to the mac address.
>
>     DHCP reservations work exceedingly well.   If you have manage_dhcp
>     turned on in your /var/lib/cobbler/settings it will write your
>     dhcp.conf
>     for you.
>     dnsmasq works even better as you can also pin the hostname from
>     cobbler
>     (dnsmasq does both DHCP and DNS, and cobbler can auto-configure it).
>
>     Example:
>
>     vi /var/lib/cobbler/settings
>     manage_dhcp : 1
>     manage_dhcp_mode : dnsmasq
>
>     # cobbler system add --name=foo --mac=AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF
>     --ip=192.168.1.50 <http://192.168.1.50> --hostname="
>     foo.example.com <http://foo.example.com>"
>
>     This will ensure that when MAC address AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF boots it will
>     automatically get the designed IP and (if using dnsmasq) the given
>     hostname.
>
>     if you leave manage_dhcp mode to "isc" (the default), you still
>     get the
>     variable $hostname accessible in your kickstart templates, so you can
>     still set hostname/etc, but you will
>     have other hoops to jump through to make it actually use it.  
>     Which is
>     what I think you are alluding to below:
>
>
>
>
>     >
>     > After trying it and seeing that it was not working, I said:
>     >
>     > Duhhhh!!!!
>     >
>     > It needs to run on the cobbler host, not the box being provisioned.
>     >
>     > Is there an easy way to do this?
>     > I can think of some that are not easy.
>
>     Possibly including...
>
>     (A) just-once-single-command-authorized-root-ssh (kind of scary)
>     (B) CGI script (still scary)
>
>     ???
>
>     Both of which pose interesting security issues.   DHCP
>     reservations are
>     the way to go, IMHO, because they can be done entirely server side --
>     but I'm not a network administrator and you might have valid
>     reasons for
>     not doing things that way.
>
>     >
>     > --
>     > Drew Einhorn
>     >
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>
> -- 
> Drew Einhorn 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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