[et-mgmt-tools] Cobbler, findks.cgi, registration, and so forth

[Michael DeHaan]

Hi folks,

So earlier I wrote about some ideas around automatically registering 
systems when Cobbler sees them, and I wrote up some example scripts for 
usage by the FreeLinuxPC guys.   To me, this seems pretty compelling as 
you wouldn't have to manually build up a list of every MAC address in 
your data center and so on.
It turns out some of the mac data I was relying on isn't present, so 
this didn't work as well as I thought it did -- but -- good news -- I 
can fix it.

So since I need to fix this, and wanted to bounce some ideas off 
everyone and find out if this would be useful or not.  It seems useful 
to me anyway, at least as a configuration option.

The idea -- all kickstart requests through cobbler will now go through a 
cgi (or more likely, a new mod python piece for performance reasons) 
that will serve up the kickstart file for all cobbler-hosted kickstart 
files.    Then, we have the configuration ability to automatically add 
new system objects (correctly configured to the proper profile) when 
they get installed.   Since we are also doing this via a web script, we 
can also decide to re-evaluate the templates at runtime, effectively 
eliminating the need for "cobbler sync" for anything but regenerating 
DNS/DHCP.

For an example of the registration case -- if you tftpboot 500 new 
systems ("straight off the truck"), and you use the PXE menu to assign 
some to "webservers" and some to "dbservers", this reorganization of how 
we do things would allow us to auto-create system records, correctly 
assigned to the profile they were assigned to, with the MAC data already 
filled in.

For security reasons, this would only add new system records if the 
objects were not already there.   Due to various catch-22's, if you add 
a new system this way, and then reinstall it using the PXE menus, we 
can't have it update the profile associations in cobbler.  However -- 
you wouldn't need to do this, because you could do something as simple as:

cobbler system edit --name=foo --newprofile=bar --netboot-enabled=1
(and cycle power)

in order to do reinstalls.

This seems to be a nice solution for logging the profiles and mac info 
at first install time and saves some data entry.  (and yes, we'll have a 
setting to turn this off).

Thoughts on this and on install time template evaluation?

--Michael