cobbler May 2011

cobbler@lists.fedorahosted.org

19 participants
19 discussions

Setting up new Cobbler server from existing one
by petermity 24 Aug '11

24 Aug '11

If I have an existing Cobbler server all set up, is there an easy way to copy all of the distros, profiles, and other Cobbler aspects from it to a freshly created unit? Could I just copy /etc/cobbler, /var/www/cobbler, and /var/lib/cobbler to the new machine and then do cobbler sync?

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Allow multiple snippets directories
by petermity 24 Aug '11

24 Aug '11

Please allow multiple directories to be listed for "snippetsdir". I like keeping my snippet files separate from the default Cobbler ones. Initially I added a symlink from the default snippets directory to my snippets. But then I have to specify the directory path for each snippet, and the hierarchy search method for per_profile etc. doesn't work under that directory. Then I changed the settings to point to my snippets directory instead of the default, and copied Cobbler's default snippets to my directory. Now I don't need to specify a path to snippets, and the hierarchy works. But then everything is mixed up, and if Cobbler's snippets change in a later release, it's easy to forget to update them. That's why it would be nice to be able to use a PATH or LIB style method to allow multiple directories to be specified for snippets. Then they don't need to be mixed up, yet the hierarchy search could work in all directories.

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How to clear "cobbler status"?
by petermity 24 Aug '11

24 Aug '11

The "cobbler status" command is handy to see when builds are running/finished. However, the display can be cluttered by units that finished building (or hung/failed) days/weeks ago, even if the Cobbler server is rebooted. Is there a way to start fresh? Related: is there a wget command or some other method to tell Cobbler that a failure occurred in the %post section? Something analogous to the $kickstart_done, maybe a $kickstart_failed?

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How to force failure?
by petermity 16 Jun '11

16 Jun '11

How can I force a failure on a bad condition, so that "cobbler profile getks" fails with a traceback (and the actual kickstart fails, and validateks fails too)? For instance, I don't want to proceed if some variable is not set: #if $getVar('myvar','') != '' # ... do something with $myvar #else # Somehow throw an error to abort, e.g.: #error "The profile must define 'myvar'" #end if

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fetchable_files, boot_files, and VMWare.
by Douglas Kilpatrick 12 Jun '11

12 Jun '11

The vmware support patch started using the field "fetchable_files" to add some files to be copied into /tftpboot by sync. (Well, by a post-sync trigger, but that's slightly different issue). Unfortunately, if you're using fetchable_files for the reason I originally envisioned, the trigger will likely blow up. I added fetchable_files to handle tftp clients that requested hardcoded paths. For example, FreeBSDs pxeboot client looks for "/boot/mfsroot.gz". The fetchable_files support is required to sanely support multiple versions of FreeBSD. The VMWare import module uses it differently. It looks like the VMWare module is using it to list additional files that need to be copied into /tftpboot to support VMWare, beyond just the two that cobbler already supports (kernel,initrd). The VMWare import patch added two triggers: one post sync, the other post distro-add to copy files in fetchable_files into /tftpboot. From the perspective of the python tftp server, that's not a problem. So there are some bad paths in fetchable files: that's ok. We'll just never check them. However, the new triggers can't really handle fetchable_files being used for the original use case. The copy fails. I think the use case that the VMWare module has is a very rational use case. I just don't think it's the appropriate use case for fetchable_files. So I'd like to propose a new field: "boot_files". I've got a couple of proposed patches on my github tree (https://github.com/kilpatds/cobbler/commits/master). At the commit history on the tree, both changes are were made on May 26th. https://github.com/kilpatds/cobbler/commit/24a531ea4943848598e8774aff408d79… is the change that adds the boot_files field. https://github.com/kilpatds/cobbler/commit/5b90509288d09bf337c7e14de780f08c… changes the sync/add triggers to use it. (The change on the 30th refactors things to get rid of the triggers: move the copy logic over to sync/litesync. But I'm not done testing that) Comments? Commentary? Requests for "TL;DR" blocks? Doug -- Doug Kilpatrick kilpatds(a)oppositelock.org

5 7

include disabled repo?
by Owen Beckley 31 May '11

31 May '11

I'm currently running cobbler 2.0.3 on CentOS 5. I was wondering if there is an automated way to have a repo included in cobbler, but have it be disabled by default when it's listed in /etc/yum.repos.d/cobbler-config.repo. For example, I would not want it to be listed in $yum_repo_stanza, but would want it listed in the output of $yum_config_stanza, but with enabled=0. Basically, I want to have a repo kept up to date with reposync, available after an install with "yum --enablerepo=XYZ", but not enabled during the initial installation. -- Owen Beckley - owenb(a)foxriver.com

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Multihoming issues - SLES
by Daniel Kertby 31 May '11

31 May '11

Hi all, We have an issue which Im certain that you guys have a clever answer to. We are using multihoming (multiple VLANs) and today have to do a 'cobbler system edit .... --server=' for each added node to have it talking the cobbler server on the correct network. When we add SLES based profiles we have to specify '--kopts=...install= http://ip/cobbler/ks_mirror/sles11...' for each profile. The issues we have are: * Our default RHEL6 based Cobbler server does not provide a default gateway to the clients. I don't know how to solve it either. - See our dhcp.template file below * Executing 'cobbler system edit...--server=...' updates 'autoyast=...' but not 'install=...'. Why? Is there anyway without directly modifying the tftp files to get this working smoothly? For our setup, it had helped alot if Cobbler had direct support for multihoming without gluing it together yourself. As always, I appreciate the help from you guys... Rgds, Daniel /etc/cobbler/dhcp.template ================================== ddns-update-style interim; allow booting; allow bootp; ignore client-updates; set vendorclass = option vendor-class-identifier; subnet NETWORK netmask NETMASK { option routers ROUTER_IP; option domain-name-servers DNS1,DNS2; option subnet-mask NETMASK; filename "/pxelinux.0"; default-lease-time 21600; max-lease-time 43200; next-server COBBLER_SERVER_IP; } ... MORE SUBNET DECLARATIONS ... #for dhcp_tag in $dhcp_tags.keys(): ## group could be subnet if your dhcp tags line up with your subnets ## or really any valid dhcpd.conf construct ... if you only use the ## default dhcp tag in cobbler, the group block can be deleted for a ## flat configuration # group for Cobbler DHCP tag: $dhcp_tag group { #for mac in $dhcp_tags[$dhcp_tag].keys(): #set iface = $dhcp_tags[$dhcp_tag][$mac] host $iface.name { hardware ethernet $mac; #if $iface.ip_address: fixed-address $iface.ip_address; #end if #if $iface.hostname: option host-name "$iface.hostname"; #end if #if $iface.subnet: option subnet-mask $iface.subnet; #end if #if $iface.gateway: option routers $iface.gateway; #end if filename "$iface.filename"; ## Cobbler defaults to $next_server, but some users ## may like to use $iface.system.server for proxied setups ##next-server $next_server; ##Next-server $iface.next_server; } #end for } #end for ==================================

2 1

non-LVM partitions in KS
by Tim Dunphy 31 May '11

31 May '11

Hello list!! I would like to create VMs using cobbler/ks that do not use LVM partitions. This is the kickstart I am attempting to use, -------------- install - ## use mirror to install url --url http://mirror.trouble-free.net/centos/5.6/os/x86_64/ - ## partitioning experiment clearpart --all lang en_US.UTF-8 network --device eth0 --bootproto dhcp --hostname snjhnew rootpw --iscrypted $default_password_crypted firewall --enabled --port=22:tcp,80:tcp authconfig --enableshadow --enablemd5 selinux --disabled timezone America/New_York bootloader --location=mbr --driveorder=xvda --append="console=xvc0" part /boot --fstype ext3 --ondisk=sda --size 300 part / --fstype ext3 --ondisk=sda --size 25000 part swap --size 2048 --ondisk=sda part /var --fstype ext3 --ondisk=sda --size 2000 part /tmp --fstype ext3 --ondisk=sda --size 2000 part /scratch --fstype ext3 --ondisk=sda --size 1 --grow %post %packages @base @core @editors @legacy-network-server @mail-server @network-server @server-cfg @text-internet @web-server keyutils and this is the result it prodces: root@new-host-8 ~]# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 3.8G 1004M 2.6G 28% / /dev/xvda1 99M 14M 81M 15% /boot tmpfs 256M 0 256M 0% /dev/shm Can I ask how I might be able to achieve the desired result of not using LVM partitions? Thanks tim -- GPG me!! gpg --keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-keys F186197B

2 1

Cobbler + SLES + CDATA script fails
by Daniel Kertby 31 May '11

31 May '11

Hi all, We are running Cobbler version 2.0.11 and tries to reuse autoyast XML files for SLES installations. If we have a embedded [CDATA[ script containing variable assignments like, variablename=$(ls) variablename2=$((othervariable + 1)) , the web server throws an ERROR 500. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 500 SERVER ERROR 2011-05-30 10:44:05 ERROR 500: SERVER ERROR. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Is this a known bug? Any workaround without hacking the embedded script? Regards, Daniel

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Cobbler 2.0.11-2
by Scott Henson 25 May '11

25 May '11

Some may have noticed that the Cobbler 2.0.11-1 release did not have a change log update in the spec file. This release fixes that. -- Scott Henson Red Hat CIS Operator WVU Alum BSAE/BSME

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cobbler May 2011