[Spacewalk-list] Provisioning Questions?

[Mark Watts]

On 04/08/2011 20:54, Wojtak, Greg wrote:
> I'm hoping someone can help me out just with understanding a couple
> things with bare metal provisioning.
>
> Our provisioning set up is such that we have a VLAN/subnet dedicated
> to provisioning.  We are using a PXE set up.  The new server powers
> on, gets an address via DHCP from the server and is then forwarded to
> the spacewalk server, where the PXE menu is displayed.
>
> I guess the part that's confusing me is this: even though we are
> using DHCP for the initial OS load, we assign all of our servers
> static IP addresses and host names in DNS.  We've got the kickstart
> 'network' directive set to use DHCP for now so we can get an IP
> address assigned on boot after the OS is installed.  After this is
> complete, we will move the host into it's new VLAN after changing
> it's networking information.
>
> I'm trying to figure out if there is a more dynamic way of doing this
> other than duplicating a kickstart profile for every single bare
> metal host we provision (ie, each profile would be identical with the
> exception of the network directive, which would have the appropriate
> hostname and ip address configured).
>
> At a bare minimum, I'd like to at least be able to tell the new
> server what it's hostname is going to be so that when it registers
> with spacewalk it doesn't show up as 'unknown' as the host name.
>
> Thanks in advance!

We turn on Cobbler's DHCP and DNS management features and create a 
system record in Cobbler for each system we provision, providing a MAC, 
IP, hostname and (Spacewalk) profile, and enable netbooting.
We use one profile for each type of OS we deploy (CentOS server, Fedora 
Desktop or Server etc).

Systems then get booted from the network, install, and activate 
themselves with Spacewalk. As part of that, the Cobbler netbooting flag 
gets unset (its automagic and default) so even if systems have their 
primary boot device as the nic, they still boot form local disk.

Puppet is used for more detailed server class configuration. We're 
experimenting with the auto-signing of client certs within Puppet too, 
to remove that manual step; eventually you'll only need to 'cobbler 
system add ... && cobbler sync' to go from bare metal to fully 
configured server without human intervention.

We don't bother with a separate VLAN as such, but we do have a dedicated 
management LAN we use for deployments.
Note that Cobbler can have more than one nic so as long as all your 
networks forward DHCP to the Cobbler/Spacewalk server, servers will get 
the right addresses on their interfaces.

The only thing we don't do, which you'd have to script, is to apply the 
DHCP address configuration as static on each server, if you wanted to 
remove that element.

Mark.