On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 9:25 PM, Dan White ygor@comcast.net wrote:
Good to see you on the list, Michael. I thought you had moved on. So it looks like the current buildiso will not give me what I am asking for. Dang.
Yes, though I want to help out here some.
I was hoping for a standalone loader that I could customize to the system level. This is because the DHCP in the environment I am in is run by the Microsoft Side of the House and I have not been able to get consistent behavior from the first part of the Cobbler net-boot process.
Reference: https://fedorahosted.org/pipermail/cobbler/2011-November/006889.html
Is buildiso.py self-contained ? I would be willing to take a shot at getting it to do what I want. Seems like a good feature to contribute for me to the stew.
If you only have the captive DHCP scenario, you don't need the standalone. As Jörgen says below, the standalone mode is intended for network-less environments. Imagine you have two environments at your work -- one is full on PXE, another is a heavily locked down lab with no outside networking and can't see the cobbler server. This allows you to provision inside that second network (or on something without a network at all). It's still fully automatic, but it puts the kickstart onto the ISO with the distribution tree.
If you only need to avoid DHCP, the default buildiso mode just puts the menu on the CD, but the install trees and kickstarts are still contained on your cobbler server. This allows you to modify the kickstarts without reburning the CD, but you would want to reburn the CD to change kernel options or add distros/profiles. However, if you're lucky, you could also just get the Microsoft side of the house to set the "next-server" parameter for your DHCP by MAC/subnet/etc to point at the Cobbler server -- assuming they can do that.