Javier Palacios wrote:
> First, the good news. I've verified that automated installs
of Debian
> "Etch" work properly.
>
Very good news!
That's really good, not only because of the success, but also
because
there is someone able/willing to test the deployment. My own tests
are quite limited due to time and also to absence of a clean machine
to install where I can safely autopartition.
You could use koan to install KVM guests (or Xen fullvirt guests, if you
wanted). qemu would work but would be a bit slow.
> * mirror a single arch/version of Debian to my local hard drive
inside
> of a web-accessible directory.(approx 50 gig, not for the faint of
> heart, nor low of disk space)
> * I used rsync, and have a proper rsync.excludes file for doing a
> single arch of etch (amd64 version of etch -- attached). This work could
> be included into a proper "cobbler import" command
>
It should be even easier, using the apt repo management in cobbler,
which I believe works properly with my last (still not submitted) patches.
As you can do a better selection of target platform, you coud reduce the
download to something like 15 Gb (still big, but that's debian way)
> * Create the Debian distro in cobbler by running this command:
> [...]
> cobbler profile add --name=debian-etch-amd64 --profile=debian-etch-amd64
> --kickstart=/etc/cobbler/etch-sample.cfg
>
> Those are the steps I followed to get a basic Debian install done via
> Cobbler.
>
I planned to write a small doc to email/wiki about how to make a deploy based
on cobbler import, so I will add your path, which I like more in
certain aspects.
> The bad news is that many of the advanced features of the kickstart
> templating don't work:
>
> * The $kickstart_start and $kickstart_done don't work for tracking
>
> A third solution is to generate a shell script dynamically with all
> commands which are needed to run, and downloading and running it in this
> manner:
>
> d-i preseed/run string foo.sh
>
If that is able to download a file and not only run a local file, I
think this will
probably be the preferred method. You have the same functionality than
wgetting the file, but in a easier to read manner. The price of both methods
is that preseed will not in general have a single file, but I expect
that the pre/post
scripts can be constructed withouth problem by the same engine that builds
the normal preseed/kickstart.
I will submit my new patches, hopefully tomorrow, and then will try to
incorporate
some of your preseeding for full partitioning (as a different file, to
reduce the risks
of my own testes), and try an example for pre/post downloads.
Excellent...
Hopefully, in a week or so, you could attempt an out of the box fully
automated
and somewhat complex install.
Javier Palacios
A huge thanks to both of you for chasing this. I think this has
tremendous potential for growing the cobbler community and building a
nice cross-distro install tool.
I'll take whatever patches are required for the pre/post stuff, if the
Debian templates don't use the same cobbler macros, and have to do
something a bit more raw/custom (such as having more visibile Cheetah
stuff in them) that would be ok with me.
--Michael
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