Joe Linoff wrote:

So I ran:

   % openssl passwd -1 'testit'
   <value>

and cut-n-pasted the <value> to the "default_password_crypted:" field in
/etc/cobbler/settings and updated everything:

Doing better than I did then - I could never get this to work with my CentOS 5.5 cobbler server - anytime I tried it cobbler came back complaining that the resulting kickstart was corrupt/invalid. In the end I generate the password with grub-md5-crypt and that seemed to work fine (well, I've done about a dozen test installs since with no problems. :D

What does the default_password_crypted field do?

As the comments in the settings file says, this field contains the encrypted password that'll be assigned to root for your newly provisioned systems. And the comments also warn you that if don't change this then you'll get a warning from the 'check' command - which I thought was a nice touch.

HTH, Bob Cross.