prefered interface question...

[Douglas Kilpatrick]

I'm writing a smart tftp server to do on-the-fly file templating and 
substitutions.

(This is to make it easier to support multiple versions of FreeBSD, 
which needs to boot by their pxeboot loader, which doesn't do 
pxelinux-like tricks to get per-host files)

1. Should I use cobbler.api, or XMLRPC?
    XMLRPC allows the tftp server to run on a different node than the
    cobbler server, but adds authorization headaches. (bot-accounts, etc)

2. Using cobbler.api causes something that feels a lot like caching.
    Client connects to my tftp server and the servers looks it up via
    cobbler.  I then use the web page to change something.  Subsequent
    lookups from the server result in the old information, but restarting
    the server causes it to get new information

    Is there a better solution that considering the cobbler-handle a per-
    request resource?

3. I'm not quite sure I understand how Item.template_files is used.  Is
    this something I can use ("if the client asks for mfsroot.gz, give
    then /var/www/cobbler/ks_mirror/$distro/boot/mfs-pxe.gz") or should I
    add another similar attribute?

Doug
-- 
Doug Kilpatrick
kilpatds(a)oppositelock.org