cobbler - chef

[Tom Brown]

Hi

We use chef as our config management system as opposed to cfengine or 
puppet.
Does anyone else use chef and of so how do you integrate it with 
cobbler? We used to use puppet and so the integration was pretty easy 
but i am wondering if there are better ways than just extracting the 
data from ksmeta?

thanks

[Jonathan Sabo]

I don't have any incite into Chef/Cobbler integration but I think your
question is part of a bigger problem of how to add arbitrary data into
cobbler and make it available externally.  Another guy just posted to
the devel list with a patch to add a field specifically for Puppet,
puppet_params.  I think continuously adding fields like this is going
to get messy pretty quickly.  I have no problem with it being added I
just think we should solve the bigger problem too.  Cobbler 2.0 has
the FIELDS data-structure which has hard coded fields defined for each
object type and the only way to get anything else in there is to make
use of the standard semi generic fields like ksmeta, continue patching
cobbler with new fields for each new use, or come up with a better way
to add arbitrary data into the cobbler datastore.  Mpdehaan wrote a
self-aware json serializer
(http://github.com/mpdehaan/snippets/blob/master/py_serializer/demo.py)
that was envisioned as a FIELDS replacement.  I think we should move
from FIELDS to skynet.py and then provide some way to allow users to
add fields dynamically and have them loaded on cobblerd restart, the
click of a button in the webui, a cli command and made available over
cobbler api, xml-rpc (or whatever), and the cli.  The web interface
could load the fields from json or xml-rpc call and present whatever
is found.  I think if you go that route you'll be able to do whatever
you want as far as new field types.  I still think there should be a
set of core fields and perhaps optional sets or something that you can
enable in settings based on external integration like puppet or chef
integration.  No one wants to scroll through a ton of fields they
don't use trying to find the few they need to do whatever they're
doing.  I like the idea of being able to enable sets of fields for
specific uses and dynamically creating your own you might not want to
share with the world.  Time for another Mt Dew.

On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 5:49 PM, Tom Brown  wrote:
> Hi
>
> We use chef as our config management system as opposed to cfengine or
> puppet.
> Does anyone else use chef and of so how do you integrate it with
> cobbler? We used to use puppet and so the integration was pretty easy
> but i am wondering if there are better ways than just extracting the
> data from ksmeta?
>
> thanks
>
> cobbler mailing list
> [e-mail]
> https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler