[et-mgmt-tools] Alternative storage backends for Cobbler / otherfeatures

[Peter Wright]

Michael DeHaan wrote:
>
> So there's been a lot of interest around having Cobbler read LDAP
> recently, and possibly I'm guessing it would be useful to have it
> /write/ to LDAP.  I know several
> folks already have their own scripts to interface between the two.
>

This would be a *huge* win for my environment, and I'm sure for other 
folks dealing with more than a handful of machines.  As far as writing 
to LDAP, while it may be nice in some circumstances - generating config 
files alone would be excellent.

<snip>

> Most likely what would happen is I'll implement the framework for
> allowing arbitrary formats with a sqlite prototype, and if someone else
> wants to add
> in LDAP later that would be pretty easy to do by following the sqlite
> module's lead.
>

SQL support would be interesting - assuming that most people store their 
machine inventory in some soft of RDBMS - but for my use I think having 
LDAP support will scale better to multiple facilities.  Enterprise LDAP 
implementations are generally designed with replication in mind (be it 
for a local LDAP cluster or to replicate a LDAP domain across multiple 
sites) - replicating a SQL DB seems like excessive baggage, especially 
if you are hoping to use cobbler/koan to manage multiple sites and 
datacenters.

>
> The other thing on the radar is finally making the XMLRPC API
> bi-directional (by adding an additional secure version on another port)
> to make the life of webapps using the Cobbler API easier.  I've been
> meaning to do that for a while.   Until then apps that need write access
> to cobbler configs can go through the python API and/or the YAML tree.
>
nice!!

<snip>

>
> Comments?  Questions?    Ideas?
>

thanks for all the hard work you've done with cobbler/koan - it's 
literally shaved several weeks of engineering time for a project I am 
working on!

I wish I had more time to help out getting these features added to 
cobbler, unfortunately that is unlikely for the foreseeable future.  I 
can offer testing, debugging help and as usual my two bit's :)

-pete



-- 
Peter Wright
Systems Administrator
Sony Pictures Imageworks
wright at imageworks.com
www.imageworks.com