10:02 a.m.
Kevin James wrote:
Hi all,
I'm working through getting Cobbler running on SuSE (specifically SLES
10). So far I've got it to build (version 1.3.4), using the OpenSuSE
Build Service. The RPMs can be found here:
http://software.opensuse.org/search?q=cobbler
http://software.opensuse.org/search?q=Koan
If you've got an account on OBS you can look at the project files:
https://build.opensuse.org/package/show?package=cobbler&project=home:...
https://build.opensuse.org/package/show?package=Koan&project=home:rincewind23
Now on to my question. I've patched the 1.3.4 source from
http://people.fedoraproject.org/~mdehaan/files/cobbler/cobbler-1.3.4.tar.gz so that
cobbler check now does proper checks
for services running when it's on suse. What's the process to feed back that
patch for possible inclusion? For my build
project I used "diff -uNr" but I've seen some other patches on the mailing
list using "diff --git". Is this process
documented somewhere?
Posting the patches to the mailing list is the way to go. diff -u 10
is acceptable, git-format-patch or posting a link to your own git tree
to merge also works.
You can read more here: https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/PatchProcess
1.3.4 is a test release, 1.4.X (the stable release, we're using the old
kernel versioning system) will be out Friday.
Cobbler looks very useful for a project I'm working on right now,
and
although I haven't got it running on SLES yet, I'd like to try and get
any work I do to achieve that included back into Cobbler.
Outstanding, I'm very interested in seeing this happen.
Offhand, I think there are a few things it needs to be truly useful on SuSE:
-- "Cobbler distro add" works fine with "--breed=suse" (and folks have
confirmed this) but "cobbler import" really would be more useful if it
could import SuSE DVDs and rsync mirrors
-- /var/lib/cobbler/kickstarts really could use a sample autoyast XML
file to go with the various sample kickstarts. Cobbler auto-assigns
base (minimal) installations based on the media it imports. This helps
folks who don't initially know kickstart as they have something to start
with. While AutoYast is definitely machine generated (it's XML, after
all) having a base installation to use with systems that have just been
imported seems helpful.
-- Currently there's a facility for kickstart snippets that are very
useful for RHEL/Fedora, but they probably don't work so well for Debian
and don't exist for SLES. We may want to look at modifying the snippets
content to contain "if this distro do this" kind of logic in a few
places. In particular, some of the disk setup and network setup stuff
would be very nice if it worked consistently across distros. We also
have a few magic things like "$kickstart_done" (takes care of status
tracking and preventing PXE boot loops, etc) that aren't expressed in
SNIPPET logic -- for 1.5, we'll probably be trying to move those to
snippets to make things consistent.
-- "Cobbler repo add" is an abstraction around update mirroring and
currently does a --breed=redhat (yum) and a
--breed=debian(apt-mirror). I'm not sure if we'd want to add anything
here. I'm also not sure how well packagekit could be leveraged for
mirroring, but that may be a reasonable option that might save work for
future distributions being added to cobbler.
-- Anything required to make koan work for virtualization (--virt) and
reinstalls (--replace-self). (I presume grubby is available -- the
koan libvirt code should just work I'd think, if it doesn't, let us know)
None of the above are required, it's good to just have the RPM, but I
think those would go along way to getting Cobbler more towards the
"universal install server" we want it to be.
If you have any patches for the RPM spec files we'll also take those as
a fair amount of folks like to build out of git.
--Michael
Cheers,
KEv.