Serving Remote Kickstart/Snippet Files
Just wanted to post about some work I'm doing to support fetching
kickstarts and snippets over HTTP (and likely FTP/NFS as well). This
is to allow tighter integration for larger systems looking to
incorporate Cobbler. I wanted to post a little about what I've found
and plan to do in case it raises any alarms.
It appears you can already specify kickstarts as direct URLs, the only
caveat is that we don't do snippet replacement on them and just pass
the URL through directly to the client. I'm planning to modify this to
actually do the templating on the fly, and pass a cobbler hosted URL
for the kickstart to the client.
Snippets are expected to be stored on the local filesystem, as defined
by the /etc/cobbler/settings snippetsdir setting, I'm planning to
change this to support URLs as well. That might be a little sluggish
giving the multiple locations we check snippets for to support the
per-system and per-profile snippet functionality, but it should not
impact regular standalone cobbler users.
The kickstart behavior may need to be disabled by default in a config
setting so as not to impact existing users. The snippets should be
fine, just keep your snippetsdir pointing to the local filesystem and
nothing should change.
Let me know if you have any thoughts concerns or suggestions.
Thanks,
Devan
--
Devan Goodwin <dgoodwin(a)rm-rf.ca>
http://rm-rf.ca