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

[Bryan Kearney]

Couple of things having been using the cobbler cli for a while:

1) I find myself adding single ksmeta tags, and having to re-create the 
whole list. I would be nice to be able to CRUD a single element in the 
ksmeta field.
2) Much of the data in the profiles is "important" and I would like to 
put that into source code control. So.. a way to import and export a 
tree of profiles would be swanky.

-- bk


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.
>
> I'm thinking about abstracting the serializer code to allow for 
> configs in arbitrary formats, though the existing YAML will be the 
> default
> and will not require any configuration for existing installs -- or new 
> ones.   I will not taking your non-XML human-readable config files 
> away from you :)
> Anyhow, the serializer stuff is already somewhat modular so I don't 
> expect this to be terribly complicated.  The hard part will be 
> engineering things to not
> need to worry about schema upgrades.
>
> The DB options are mainly to keep queries fast as we scale up into 
> thousands of system records.  Future scaling work may also (probably) 
> imply looking more towards OMAPI when dealing with ISC's dhcp.conf 
> versus having to template out the file.   If someone things that is 
> needed (or even better, would like to work on that), please speak up.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> There was also a great suggestion about giving koan a very basic 
> --register function, that would add an entry in the cobbler DB that 
> tells the admin that he needs to set the system up.   It would fill in 
> the MAC, IP, and the hostname -- but that's it.   This is probably 
> going to be a bit further down the pipe than the above but it would be 
> useful for
> cases where taking manual inventory of all the MACs in a datacenter 
> would be a bit painful.   We already have most of the code to do this 
> from virt-factory, in fact, and we
> can add this into the existing Cobbler API.
>
> Comments?  Questions?    Ideas?
>
> --Michael
>
>
>
>
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