cobbler no longer generates dhcp host entries when netboot disabled, static, management

[Jonathan Sabo]

List,

Previous versions of Cobbler (2.1) would render out the host entries
for systems that were netboot enabled and netboot disabled.  I believe
the behavior was that you could have systems defined as static, and
management, with their subnets added and all that information was
available in dhcp host entries.   If you've chosen to use cobbler to
manage your dhcp configuration and you want to be able to have the
subnet set and the interface designated as the management interface,
previously you would make sure static was set and everything worked by
rendering out host entries and if it was netboot disabled it would
just boot from the local disk.  Right now you end up with a dhcpd.conf
with:

# group for Cobbler DHCP tag: default
group {
}

I was chatting in the irc channel with some of the devs and I guess
these changes were made to support an arch that wasn't working.  I
thought static meant that this is a static lease which was why the
netmask and management option appear.  That was my understanding.   I
have lots of servers running cobbler 2.1 and code written to pull in
those options.  As I've started to test with the newer versions of
Cobbler I noticed the behavior has changed.  I would like to have the
same behavior available in the newer versions of Cobbler.  I'm curious
what other people think about that.   We could test for the
misbehaving arch's and make it a special case.   It's been awhile
since I was using Cobbler so I'm not sure how long it's been like
this...   Thoughts?

Thanks,

Jonathan

[Greg Swift]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 2:51 PM, Jonathan Sabo  wrote:
> List,
>
> Previous versions of Cobbler (2.1) would render out the host entries
> for systems that were netboot enabled and netboot disabled.  I believe
> the behavior was that you could have systems defined as static, and
> management, with their subnets added and all that information was
> available in dhcp host entries.   If you've chosen to use cobbler to
> manage your dhcp configuration and you want to be able to have the
> subnet set and the interface designated as the management interface,
> previously you would make sure static was set and everything worked by
> rendering out host entries and if it was netboot disabled it would
> just boot from the local disk.  Right now you end up with a dhcpd.conf
> with:
>
> # group for Cobbler DHCP tag: default
> group {
> }
>
> I was chatting in the irc channel with some of the devs and I guess
> these changes were made to support an arch that wasn't working.  I
> thought static meant that this is a static lease which was why the
> netmask and management option appear.  That was my understanding.   I
> have lots of servers running cobbler 2.1 and code written to pull in
> those options.  As I've started to test with the newer versions of
> Cobbler I noticed the behavior has changed.  I would like to have the
> same behavior available in the newer versions of Cobbler.  I'm curious
> what other people think about that.   We could test for the
> misbehaving arch's and make it a special case.   It's been awhile
> since I was using Cobbler so I'm not sure how long it's been like
> this...   Thoughts?

The default behavior of cobbler is a lease.  If you specify an IP
address then the behavior is a static lease.  If you check the static
checkbox then the host machine will be configured with the IP during
boot, if you use the standard snippet.

So for the behavior you are expecting you would just leave off the
static check box.

When you have the netboot option enabled is the only time a host that
has 'static' checked should get DHCP.  Thus removing the entry, which
confused solaris hosts (i think thats what it was), made sense.

-greg