[et-mgmt-tools] Installing without PXE, and without the live CD -- "cobbler buildiso"
Michael DeHaan
mdehaan at redhat.com
Tue May 6 14:23:54 UTC 2008
>
> Also, this might be a dumb question but does the livecd know how to
> "install to self" as well?
The live CD (not to be confused with "cobbler buildiso", which is a
simpler "dead" CD) works by detecting the first available HDD during
boot up, then formats the drive and installs grub on it's MBR. Koan
is then invoked to modify grub on the MBR. The livecd can be built to
install to a specific profile name (as defined in Cobbler at the time of
installation, not build time), or can be set to autodiscover. In this
case, koan scans the interfaces for a mac address, and does a remote
look up in Cobbler (via XMLRPC) to find the name of the matching Cobbler
system object, if any.
This way, the live CD simulates the assignment of a given system (by MAC
address) to a given profile, in just the same way that PXE works.
However, this requires building the live CD on F8, and is not as
tolerant of finding "new" hardware (such as my SAS card), and the "dead"
CD will always work in those scenarios -- you just won't have the
potential for auto-discovery.
The question then remains do we keep the live CD around, and just use
the simpler "dead" CD, or what... the likely answer is that we end up
having both, and explain that for 90% of the users, the "dead" CD is
fine, and the live one is only needed if you want to do assignments
between systems and profiles remotely, to achieve "PXE equivalence" in
that respect. That is probably not critical for most folks, but might
be nice to have.
>
> Yours,
>
> Aaron
>
> On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 10:47 AM, Michael DeHaan <mdehaan at redhat.com
> <mailto:mdehaan at redhat.com>> wrote:
>
> Subhendu Ghosh wrote:
>
> Michael DeHaan wrote:
>
> For a while Cobbler has had a solution based on koan and
> the live CD to enable network provisioning of bare metal
> in environments that either do not have DHCP, or do not
> have control over DHCP that is sufficient enough to set up
> a PXE environment. Naturally, if you can set up a PXE
> environment with Cobbler, it's very useful to have, and
> you'll want it.
>
> So, along came the live CD.
>
> The live CD was built using a recent Fedora, and it had
> the magic ability to install any distro -- /except/ you
> had to use Fedora to build the Live CD, and the build
> process was slow, and the live image was a bit bigger than
> it needed to be. However, due to driver constraints, it
> didn't always support the latest in storage technology --
> that was a
>
> problem.
>
>
> We have finally implemented the low-tech solution, thanks
> to various folks in Red Hat GPS, and some hacking I've
> done to integrate that closer into cobbler.
>
> Using 0.9.X or later (it's checked in now into the git
> "devel" branch) you can do:
>
> cobbler buildiso [--iso=] [--tempdir=] [--profiles=]
>
> This will automatically generate an ISO that allows for
> menus just like Cobbler's PXE boot menus, for installing
> new systems. I also plan to allow a configurable default
> profile for those who want to mass deploy this image using
> remote management processors, etc.
>
> The menu will contain an entry for each bare metal
> bootable profile, with the current data set in Cobbler.
> Given that Cobbler now generates kickstarts in real time,
> changes to the kickstart templates can be made without
> reburning the CD!
>
> Again, the live CD is more dynamic, but this is much
> smaller, faster, and easier to build.
> The one thing the live CD still offers is simulation of
> the MAC address detection feature of PXE, but if you don't
> need to use cobbler system records to provision your
> lab/datacenter/etc, this will also get you there -- and is
> probably the perfect fit if the Live CD was not working
> out for you.
>
> Test release will be available soon, git is available now.
>
> --Michael
>
>
> If the iso(s) can be made available through the web
> infrastructure, and accessible via a predefined or calculated
> path, then a external rules engine could drive the
> provisioning process through the remote management
> processors's virtual media capabilities.
>
> It can :)
>
> mkdir /var/www/html/foo
> cobbler buildiso --iso=/var/www/html/foo/kickstart.iso
> I just need add the flag for setting what the default is and
> making the timeouts variable.
>
>
> Perhaps the profiles module could be extended to define
> whether a iso should be generated or not. An easy way to
> automatically generate boot isos.
>
>
> Right now there's some basic code to keep paravirt "-xen" distros
> from showing up on the ISO since they have no chance of being
> bootable. Though that is a good idea.
>
> Another possibility is to add it as "cobbler profile edit
> --name=foo ... --menu=foo" to do submenus, and if we really wanted
> that. We could allow
> --menu=hide as part of that syntax.
>
> -sg
>
>
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