[et-mgmt-tools] Looping through possibilities in a "snippet"

[Sandor W. Sklar]

On Apr 11, 2008, at 1:05 PM, Michael DeHaan wrote:
>
> I've implemented this here -- with only a slight change to the way  
> the above behavior works (basically there are no distro-overrides
> and the paths are slightly different):
>
> https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/KickstartSnippets
>
> It's under the "Advanced Snippets" section and is available now in  
> the git/devel branch. Testing welcome!

I've tested this out with a fairly simple contrived example, and it  
worked perfectly.  I created the following files and directories:

# find /var/lib/cobbler/snippets -type f
/var/lib/cobbler/snippets/packages
/var/lib/cobbler/snippets/post
/var/lib/cobbler/snippets/pre
/var/lib/cobbler/snippets/per_profile/packages/testprofile
/var/lib/cobbler/snippets/per_profile/post/testprofile
/var/lib/cobbler/snippets/per_profile/pre/testprofile


I created this profile:

# cobbler profile report --name=testprofile
profile         : testprofile
parent          : rhel5Server-x86_64
kickstart       : /etc/cobbler/foo.ks
(... snip ...)

And then added two system records:

# cobbler system add --name=system1 --ip=172.24.10.10 --mac="00:16:3e: 
43:22:02" --profile=rhel5Server-x86_64

# cobbler system add --name=system2 --ip=172.24.20.20 --mac="00:16:3e: 
40:0a:a3" --profile=testprofile

... and ran "cobbler sync"; the rendered kickstarts in /var/www/ 
cobbler/kickstarts_sys/{system1,system2}/ks.cfg contained exactly what  
I expected (system1's had the contents of snippets/ 
{packages,post,pre}, and system2's had the contents of snippets/ 
per_profile/{packages,post,pre}/testprofile.)

This is a totally awesome improvement, and when the devel version is  
ready for prime-time, it is going to make a *huge* difference in the  
simplicity of our systems deployment.

I've got a few comments about the testing process and some issues I  
ran into; these comments shouldn't be construed as criticism, as I  
expect most of those issues are of my own making or ignorance.  That  
said:

*  I'd never used "git", nor installed it before.  It took me a little  
bit to figure out how to get it onto an RHEL5 system, but once I set  
up the EPEL yum repo, it installed cleanly.  The PatchProcess wiki  
page helped immensely in getting going, but I think it would be useful  
to have a "How to build a devel branch RPM  on an RHEL5 system for  
dummies" page (I'd be happy to write it, unless y'all think this is  
something that shouldn't be in the wiki.)

*  The last version of cobbler I built (from the src.rpm) was 0.8.2.   
Sometime between that version and the devel, a dependancy on the  
python-ldap module was added.  The RPM built, but all cobbler actions  
failed with the traceback:

   ... (snip)
   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/modules/ 
authn_ldap.py", line 20, in ?
     import ldap
ImportError: No module named ldap


Perhaps I just missed something that stated that requirement.  It  
would be really nice, though, if those of us that have no use for the  
authentication parts (ldap, for one) could disable it, perhaps with a  
config variable like "use_ldap: 0".

* This might be a known issue, but when I imported a distro ...

# mount -o loop ./rhel-5.1-server-x86_64-dvd.iso /mnt
# cobbler import --path=/mnt --name=rhel5Server-x86_64

... it ran fine, and then exited with the below traceback.  The distro  
appeared to suffer no ill effect from this error, or, at least it  
worked for everything that I tested in this limited setup environment:

- processing: /var/www/cobbler/ks_mirror/rhel5Server-x86_64/images/xen
---------------- (associating kickstarts)
- finding default kickstart template for redhat 5.0
- tree: http://@@http_server@@/cblr/links/rhel5Server-x86_64
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/cobbler.py", line  
53, in main
     return BootCLI().run(sys.argv)
   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/cobbler.py", line  
42, in run
     return self.loader.run(args)
   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/commands.py", line  
69, in run
     return fn.run()
   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/modules/ 
cli_misc.py", line 97, in run
     arch=self.options.arch
   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/api.py", line 351,  
in import_tree
     return importer.run()
   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/action_import.py",  
line 155, in run
     self.kickstart_finder()
   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/action_import.py",  
line 224, in kickstart_finder
     self.distros.add(distro,save=True) # re-save
   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/collection.py", line  
206, in add
     self.lite_sync.add_single_distro(ref.name)
   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/action_litesync.py",  
line 62, in add_single_distro
     self.sync.copy_single_distro_files(distro)
   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/action_sync.py",  
line 319, in copy_single_distro_files
     utils.linkfile(kernel, os.path.join(distro_dir, b_kernel))
   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/utils.py", line 561,  
in linkfile
     return utils.copyfile(src, dst)
NameError: global name 'utils' is not defined


Like I said, this new improvement in snippet handling greatly benefits  
us, and I'm really excited to be able to deploy it, hopefully soon  
(I'll wait until its available in the "stable" branch ... our cobbler  
server has become too important for me to screw up!  :-)

Thanks again, Michael!

	-s-