[et-mgmt-tools] Cobbler enchant problem

[Michael DeHaan]

Richard Abbott wrote:
> I am having some trouble using the cobbler enchant command. When I type
> the following 'cobbler enchant --address=192.168.1.200
> --profile=rhel4as-Test1-i386' on the cobbler server I get the following
> error "Cobbler does not understand 'enchant'"
>   

Enchant was deprecated in a previous release, and removed relatively 
recently -- it was basically a wrapper for several SSH calls (including 
pushing a copy of koan and installing it), which could be better done 
with SSH.   The main reason it was removed wasn't because of that, but 
because it required having koan RPMs locally and knew about only one RPM 
-- which wasn't good if you wanted to use koan against lots of different 
distributions.   It played some games with Python paths and so forth to 
make this work, but it really wasn't the right way to go, and it was a 
bit strange to set up as you had to have a local copy of a koan RPM.

The solution is to invoke koan over SSH, or, if you would like to use 
func (https://hosted.fedoraproject.org/projects/func/) it also has a 
virtualization module that supports calling koan remotely to install 
profiles/systems -- which will be much easier than SSH because of 
simplified cert distribution as well as being able to address multiple 
systems at once.
Just putting 'koan' in your packages section of your kickstart 
eliminates the need of pushing it out with "enchant" ... if you are 
using Enterprise Linux 5+, you can reference the yum repositories that 
have koan in them in your kickstart file.  If you're using RHEL4, fetch 
the koan RPM with wget and then install it in post.

Hope that helps!

--Michael


> I have cobbler-0.6.2-2.fc7 and koan-0.6.2-2.fc7 installed.
>
> I have placed the koan-0.6.2-2.fc6.noarch.rpm (have also used the
> el4.noarch.rpm) file in /var/lib/cobbler and have the following line in
> the /var/lib/cobbler/settings file "koan_path:
> /var/lib/cobbler/koan-0.6.2-2.fc6.noarch.rpm"
>
> After adding that line I did a "cobbler sync" and when I try to enchant
> a system it doesn't work.
>
> I have followed the instructions in the man page for setting up a
> cobbler server and everything looks correct in the "cobbler report" output.
>
> Anyone know what I'm doing wrong?
>
> Thanks
>
>