Gino LV. Ledesma wrote:
Hi, all
I'm curious to know what other users have done for automating desktop installs. I've been reading the wiki and got a number of ideas using snippets. What I'm trying to do is do "self-installs", where a user can provision his or her own desktop with customizations for that user. It would be something like:
- User PXE boots machine
- User selects a profile
- ???
- Machine gets provisioned according to profile
- Machine is ready for use with user's custom settings
The constraint here is that I'd like to move away from creating system profiles prior to the install (which would normally require getting the MAC address and registering it with cobbler).
We call these "system records" not "profiles", as we already have a "profiles" and saying "profile profiles" is weird.
What I'd like to tell cobbler (step 3) is that I'm provisioning this machine for a specific user -- perhaps by passing something onto the kernel command line as a parameter, and then having the post-install section do the customization based on that. For example, I could pass in username=$username and then a script/trigger could fire off and lookup a DB for that user, and then create the accounts/profiles/apps/configs/etc automatically.
What many folks do is create a web interface that allows the user to answer specific questions, and then save those answers as template varariables in the system objects which are used when evaluating the kickstart template.
If you want to do this via PXE you must create system records.
I'm constrained to working with Windows managing DHCP, so I'm trying to pass the hostname onto the kickstart parameters somehow so I can get it register itself and update DDNS. As you can tell from the above, we're trying to reuse a single "generic" profile (which is my baseline) and simply customizing the install for a specific user (i.e. by adding that user's account) without creating.
Per MAC pxe works here.
So my questions are:
- Is supplying this last information via kernel command line the best option?
Not really :)
- Can we somehow get a ksmeta variable set at profile-selection time
outside of cobbler (e.g. in the boot selection menu)? (I doubt it)
No.
- Short of implementing integration with LDAP/Kerberos/Active
Directory for authentication and using roaming user directories, are there any recommendations for "user provisioning" via cobbler? My last recourse is to have the account provisioning be done as a first-boot option.
Possibly make the said webapp template manage Puppet and just make sure all systems are subscribed. Or do what I said above about making system objects in the webapp.
- gino
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