[Thincrust-devel] Using cobbler to provision images

[Bryan Kearney]

I put some code into the latest version of cobbler which allows for 
provisioning images which are based on the thincrust tools. Here is a 
quick script which shows how you can use the latest dev cobbler and koan 
as a simple provisioning engine.

See if this is more what you were looking for. It provides step by step
instructions to build a Sugar desktop appliance and deploy it via a
local cobbler server.

-- bk


# This assumes you have the latest cobbler devel branch installed, and
# the latest koan devel branch.

# The use case will be to build a Sugar desktop appliance and deploy it
# locally using koan. We will then access it via virt-manager
# The main difference with distributed deployment would be
# moving hte image file to network storage

# Ensure that we have the libraries we need
yum install appliance-tools libvirt python-virtinst virt-manager
virt-viewer wget

# Create a work directory
su -
mkdir cobbler_test
cd cobbler_test

# Get a kickstart file for the sugar desktop
wget -O sugar-f10.ks
"http://git.et.redhat.com/?p=acex.git;a=blob_plain;f=sugarxo/resources/sugar-f10.ks"

# Build an appliance image using appliance-creator
appliance-creator --name=sugarDesktop --config sugar-f10.ks --cache /tmp

# You now have a sugarDesktop-sda.raw file (disk image) and a
sugarDesktop.xml file metadata
# Inspect the metadata
cat sugarDesktop.xml

# Push the appropriate values to cobbler. For this example, we will use
the default network connection
# the virt-bridge is blanked out
cobbler image add --name sugarDesktop --virt-cpus 1 --virt-ram 512 \
         --file /root/cobbler_test/sugarDesktop-sda.raw \
         --network-count 1 --image-type virt-clone  \
         --virt-bridge " " --virt-type auto

# Deploy a clone of the image on your machine and put it in /tmp, call
it my_sugar_desktop
koan --server localhost --virt-name my_sugar_desktop --image
sugarDesktop --virt --virt-path /tmp

# Now, connect to the appliance using virt-manager or virt-viewer
virt-viewer my_sugar_desktop