Announcing cobbler & koan: New provisioning tools for PXE, Xen, and Auto-Kickstart

[Michael DeHaan]

Cobbler is a command line tool for simplified configuration of a 
boot/provisioning server. It supports provisioning via PXE, Xen 
(requires libvirt-python), and re-provisioning via "auto-kickstarting". 
The last two modes require usage of a program called "koan" on the 
remote system. 

Koan stands for "kickstart-over-a-network". It interacts with a 
centralized boot server that has been configured with cobbler.

Documentation for each app is contained in the manpages for the 
respective programs (for now). Both applications are written in Python 
and are released under the GPL.

Comments, questions, and feedback are highly encouraged -- the future 
direction of this app will assuredly be guided by how people use it and 
what they like/don't like.   I am aiming to address needs of 
administrators of both small networks and very large several farms, so I 
am interested in hearing about all sorts of (Linux) deployment use 
cases.   Bug reports (via email for now) and patches are also welcome.   
A public mercurial server and online documentation are in the works.

http://michaeldehaan.net/software/RPMS

Michael DeHaan