On Monday, October 20, 2014, Alan Evangelista <alanoe(a)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
Alan,
At one of my previous employers, I used cobbler to dhcp a from scratch
Linux OS that ran in memory. It would come online and then run a small
script to connect to cobbler via the super simple xmlrpc api, get a list of
interfaces (set with the MAC address for each interface), write out
/etc/Iftar, and actually rename all of the interfaces and ip them with
cobbler as the authoritative source.
That might be a more advanced use case but is absolutely a valid one.
Please don't remove a feature like this. My take on config management
(puppet, salt, ansible, etc) is that you should setup the partitioning and
network bits before the config management runs. Please don't alienate users
just because you don't use a given feature.
--
Text by Jeff, typos by iPhone