> I am new to Cobbler, and am wondering if anyone uses it to provision a large cluster? Rather than having to collect a lot of MAC addresses and manually create all the system records, I'd like to be able to have systems register themselves when they are first booted.

Assuming the Cobbler server sits in an internal cluster network, when we are provisioning the (uniform) worker nodes for the first time, we simply set the default entry for PXE boots to provision the correct distro, depending on your paths e.g. in /var/lib/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default. You can enable menu in cobbler settings to let cobbler sync generate you a file showing the available profiles with the correct params. In the kickstart we use cobbler_register.

> I've seen the snippet 'cobbler_register' which seems intended for this purpose, but I can't figure out how to use it. Is anyone doing this? If so can you provide specifics on how to do so?

The snippet should just work when its used in a kickstart with $SNIPPET('cobbler_register'). Be sure to set register_new_installs in cobbler settings. We also have pxe_just_once set to 1. 

--

André Gemünd
Fraunhofer-Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing
andre.gemuend@scai.fraunhofer.de
Tel: +49 2241 14-2193
/C=DE/O=Fraunhofer/OU=SCAI/OU=People/CN=Andre Gemuend