Hi Alan,

Here's some of the reasons i can think of why having support for multiple interfaces would be useful:

- Not everybody is using configuration management tools (eg. small environments)
- Configuration management integration is rather weak (atm just Puppet)
- It could be that pxe/install interface is physically separated from management (eg. Puppet) and/or production interfaces (eg. due to security policy)
- Managing machine specific data with configuration management tools might not be that easy (eg. Puppet before Hiera got introduced)

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
Jörgen


On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 5:32 AM, Alan Evangelista <alanoe@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
I would like to understand why Cobbler allows user to define several network interfaces in system object.
Netboot and automated installation processes only require 1 network interface and supporting multiple
network interfaces introduce complexity. Possible motivations I see:

1) allow user to quickly alternate between different network interfaces for testing purposes
2) automatically setup all network interfaces in a system

imho motivation 2 is a strong point, but it goes beyond the scope of network installation and automated
installation. I see in http://projects.theforeman.org/issues/2240 that people are
requesting the same feature in Foreman to support automatic setup of all network interfaces
using Puppet and its integration with Foreman. I think it makes more sense to delegate this
task (automatic setup of all network interfaces) to a config management tool (eg Puppet)
than do it in Cobbler, otherwise Cobbler ends up being a "do it all" tool.

Maybe I have a restricted view of how and how much this feature is used, so I'd like to get
some feedback from Cobbler community.


Regards,
Alan Evangelista

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