[et-mgmt-tools] Distro specific kickstarts and repo questions

[Michael DeHaan]

Matt S [UNIX Administrator] wrote:
> Would it be possible to track kickstarts based on distro? Alternatively
> could we set a default kickstart on a per-distro basis. In our
> environment we offer a monolithic configuration on various sets of
> hardware so it would be advantageous if we could use the built-in "menu"
> functionality and expect that the default kickstart will be appropriate
> for our operating system selection. 
What you want to do is create a profile for the distribution... The 
distros, by definition, do not contain kickstart information -- this is 
by design.
While you may have a monolithic setup now, once you start wanting to 
provision two or three different types of machines that all run 
FC-6-i386 (for instance),
the benefits of having different profiles becomes readily apparent.   
Until then, it's just a minor inconvenience for having a good 
abstraction layer :)

For example, you might have profiles for RHEL-5-dbserver, another for 
RHEL-5-appserver, and another profile for RHEL-5-webserver.   These are 
both RHEL-5, but they are installed differently.
We want folks to start thinking about the roles of specific machines 
rather than just what operating system they run, basically.  The same 
concepts are, in many ways,
what we try to get across when using Puppet.    However, if you just 
want to have one profile per distro for starters, that's totally ok.

>
> Maybe /etc/cobbler/$distro/default.ks
>
> For instance, we may not want the default kickstart to do things in post
> on Fedora that we want in RHEL-5.
You can assign any kickstarts you want to any profiles.   So this isn't 
a problem...

cobbler profile add --name=FC-6-i386-general --distro=FC-6-i386 
--distro=FC-6-i386 --kickstart=/opt/foo/mykickstart_fc6.ks

cobbler profile add --name=RHEL-5-i386-general --distro=RHEL-5-i386 
--distro=RHEL-5-i386 --kickstart=/opt/foo/mykickstart_rhel5.ks

>
> Perhaps there is a way to manage this in cobbler and I'm just missing
> it.
>
> Any thoughts? (I'm trying to accomplish this somewhat through the use of
> profiles)
Yes, profiles are exactly what you should use.    A distro describes 
what is being installed (the install source), a profile describes how it 
is being installed.

>
>
>
> A second question. We have some custom repo's that we want to configure
> in order that packages may be installed during provisioning. I setup a
> mirrored repo which imported all the files correctly.
>
>
> When the repo is defined during the profile creation it works but
> cobbler won't sync.
>
> /var/lib/cobbler/profiles shows the repo listed
>
> The following error is kicked back: one of the listed repositories is
> not defined in cobbler
What version of cobbler are you using?   Also what does your 
/var/lib/cobbler/profiles look like?
>
> Any help would be appreciated.
Sure, send me the above if you don't mind...
>
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