[et-mgmt-tools] Cobbler and non-Linux "distros"

[Michael DeHaan]

Peter Wright wrote:
> Jack Neely wrote:
>> Folks,
>>
>> One of my goals at NCSU has been to create a boot service that can
>> handle all Intel-ish machines.  I have that running now and am looking
>> at using Cobbler as the glue to pull all the various parts together and
>> to take advantage of koan.
>>
>> What thought has been given to non-Linux distributions?  We install
>> windows with linux but cobbler's mandated usage of ks=foo and other
>> things on the append line don't make since here.  What about other
>> utilities such as memtest or dban?
>>
>> Perhaps a different breed option to alter the feature set?
>>
>> Jack
>>   
>
> Can't speak about Windows or MacOS platforms - but I've done a little 
> investigating in using cobbler to assist with booting/building FreeBSD 
> systems and theoretically it should work.  Granted I have not looked 
> at what patches would be need to make this happen - but the underlying 
> mechanics are there (you can feed a response file similar to kickstart 
> to Freebsd, pxe booting works very will with freebsd etc.).
>
> at this point this is one of the things on my ever growing "would be 
> nice to get done soon" list :)
>
> -pete
>

I'm extremely interested in those kinds of things (both koan doing DBAN 
and the other OS support).   Given I'm not an expert in deploying 
non-Linux OS's, I won't be adding these myself (I may be able to test 
some) ... but if someone wants to add patches for *BSD or even Windows, 
I'll gladly take them.   Mixed environments are a reality, and 
especially once we have Xen PXE integrated into Cobbler (which is 
already available in F8), it would be nice to be able to deploy those 
OS's in hardware virtualization with koan, with just a single 
command.    There's already a parameter in Cobbler to identify a distro 
as foreign, it's "--breed" and we do some things already to deal with 
Debian and SuSE kernel parameters.    Since kickstarts are treated as 
generic answer files -- text -- (except by koan, which needs to learn to 
/not/ read them once again), there's nothing really keying in Cobbler to 
just kickstart-based deployments.   However, it's always going to do 
those best :)

BTW, here's an example of how someone added DBAN as a Cobbler profile 
for PXE (not just added into the template file), though koan would 
probably need some tweaking to tolerate it.   Might be a useful starting 
point:

https://hosted.fedoraproject.org/projects/cobbler/wiki/SystemRetirement

--Michael