Kickstart and roles

[Erik Sjölund]

On Thu, 2006-04-13 at 21:38 -0700, Jane Dogalt wrote:

> This is a great idea and something I was planning on doing myself.  But for
> simplicity, it seems like this could be implemented dirt-simply (from an
> infrastructure impact point of view) via rpms.  I.e. rpms that are heavy on
> specifying dependencies and pre/post scripts, but probably very light on files
> (if not in fact lacking any rpm owned files).
> 
> Therefore each role gets packaged as an rpm and placed in your yum repo, so
> that you just do a yum install of it.  That picks up all the package
> dependencies to install, and does all the system config in the (rather more
> invasive than usual) pre/post script.  Hopefully you write the rpm uninstall
> scripts with enough intelligence to revert the system exactly back to the
> preinstall state.
> 
> -jdog

Sounds a lot like: 

http://xml2hostconf.sourceforge.net/

>From the home page:

<snip>
xml2hostconf is a utility for central configuration and automatic
installation of a network of Fedora Linux computers. Instead of
inventing new installation/updating/syncing methods it uses the
functionality already present in rpm, anaconda (kickstart), dhcpd,
pxelinux and yum. xml2hostconf generates appropriate configuration files
for the above mentioned programs and let them do the work. xml2hostconf
is written in the scripting language XSLT and Python. 

xml2hostconf differs to other installation frameworks in the sense that
it lets the client setup be defined as generated configuration RPMs,
consisting of configuration files and dependencies to "normal"
application RPMs and possibly some post-installation commands. This
gives the benefit that both already installed machines and newly
installed machines will be kept in sync with the central configuration.
You don't have to reinstall a machine to get it to reflect the
configuration at the central configuration server. The command "yum
update" pulls the current configuration to the client.
</snip>

I am just about to release a new version that has been packaged with
autotools. Hopefully within the next days ...

cheers,
Erik Sjölund