[et-mgmt-tools] koan patch: reinstall from kickstart file without a cobbler server

[Michael DeHaan]

Gavin Romig-Koch wrote:
> koan patch: reinstall from kickstart file without a cobbler server
>
> This is my first crack at a koan patch to do this, please review it 
> and consider it for inclusion in koan, I'm happy to make whatever 
> changes are needed, and fix whatever mistakes I've made.
>
> This patch alters koan to allow it reinstall a machine from a 
> kickstart file, without the need for a cobbler server.  It's a rather 
> large patch given what it does.  Most of the changes are updating koan 
> not to assume that it is connected to a cobbler server.
>
> If you specify the --kickstart=URL option instead of a --server 
> option, it will load the kickstart file from the given URL.  From the 
> kickstart file it determines the URL of the install tree, and gets the 
> install kernel and initrd from within the install tree.
>
I've applied this with just some very minor modifications.   This is in 
git now and will be part of 0.6.5, which will likely be released at the 
same time we do cobbler 0.8 (the culmination of the development branch 
work on 0.7.x)
which should be coming very shortly, after there's a final round of 
0.7.X testing*.   (Just to avoid confusion I'll probably just bump koan 
to 0.8 then as well.)

I've basically changed --kickstart to --no-cobbler to reduce some 
confusion, changed some of the output text a bit, and added a section 
describing the usage to the manpage.

This is a very neat patch because there are a lot of times people would 
want the equivalent of "reinstall this system" and for whatever reason 
don't have a Cobbler server, so I expect this will get
a lot of use as people find out about it.

Thanks,

--Michael

* = the two final things I want to explore for Cobbler 0.7.X are VMware 
and support for recursive syncs (effectively eliminating most needs of 
running "cobbler sync") and deletes.