cobbler questions

[Michael DeHaan]

Phillip Groven wrote:

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> *If I have a working kickstart will cobbler overwrite my existing 
> kickstart?*
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No, thankfully not :)   Having a migration path is important.

Cobbler can use existing kickstarts by referencing them as http:// URLs, 
but also has a more powerful kickstart templating system that helps you 
construct kickstarts with subtle differences between your various 
profiles and systems.   In this way, you can share a common kickstart 
template, but maintain your package lists or other machine specific 
options outside of your kickstart template.   This makes it very 
workable for static IP configurations, or when you have a lot of 
customization to do that would be hard with having a kickstart for each 
individual system.   Cobbler uses the widely-used template language 
Cheetah to power it's templating technology.
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> *What OS versions does cobbler run on?*
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All of this information is on http://cobbler.et.redhat.com -- The server 
needs EL 4, EL 5, Fedora 7 and later.   koan can also
run on RHEL3.    Many non-Fedora/Red-Hat based distributions can also be 
provisioned.

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> *What OS versions can cobbler kickstart?*
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Any RHEL or derivative distro, Any Fedora, and also some support for 
deploying Debian/Ubuntu or SuSE (though this is less evolved -- but 
growing over time).

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> *What versions of vmware will it support?*
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At this point, just VMware server (the free, but not open source, 
one).   Someone has added code to do VMware workstation but I need to 
incorporate it back into "koan", which is Cobbler's helper tool.   
Cobbler works much better with tools like Xen and qemu/KVM, both of 
which are supported by libvirt.   VMware is not and the management tools 
are less useful.
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> *How is cobbler different than Red Hat Satellite server?*
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Cobbler offers more customization options in lots of ways, but also does 
not include monitoring or config management built in, like Satellite can 
do.  Cobbler does not require a database -- there is a web interface, 
though most of the power of cobbler can be accessed from the command 
line.   Package management in Cobbler is also mainly keyed around using 
yum.   Cobbler also supports deploying distributions that Satellite does 
not yet support in some cases -- such as also deploying Fedora.   koan 
also supports some additional virtualization features that Satellite 
does not support -- namely qemu/KVM, VMware (experimental), installing 
in LVM partitions, multiple network interfaces, and so forth.   If you 
are not large enough to need a Satellite -- you can still use Cobbler, 
though if you are that large, with something like rhn_regks, you can 
still use Cobbler to deploy systems that register against Satellite.  
It's easy to do.
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> *Is cobbler supported by Red Hat Enterprise?*
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Cobbler is not generally available in an "officially supported" context 
yet.   It is however available in EPEL ( 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL ) and many people do use Cobbler to 
deploy their Red Hat Enterprise Linux.   Cobbler does have community 
support via the mailing list and IRC, and maintains seperate 
stable/development releases.    Regardless, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 
you deploy /with/ Cobbler will still be supported :)

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> *Is there a cobbler-list instead of kickstart-list?*
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Yes!   et-mgmt-tools at redhat.com -- which you can find the signup page 
from https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler (which hosts the Wiki and Trac 
instance for Cobbler).  
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