Yes, I would be interested more in making cobbler deploy Ubuntu than running on
it. Although, it would be nice to be able to do both.

In my mind, making pxegen.py config write function do the right thing when
generating a config for Ubuntu with both kickseed or preseeding, would be a priority
... as this fails early on in the deployment phase and the manual fix is not scalable.
(you really don't want to fudge the pxe config files by hand if you have
more than 2 systems ... and most certainly not if you have 200 ;-)
On the other hand, I don't know how many people are using kickseed.

In contrast, adding an Ubuntu distro may involve some manual effort at this time,
but it is done once and does not need to be scaled to the number of systems.
Having said that, if any body can fix that ... great.

I took a look a the pxegen.py code and the fix is not entirely trivial. This is due to the
fact that both kickstart (kickseed) and preseeding need to be supported. Disabling the
said line will assume all Ubuntu deployments are using kickseed; leaving it in assumes that all
Ubuntu deployments are using preseeding. Some mechanism for distinguishing between
the two is needed (ks/preseed filename extension? code parsing, added attribute in the
profile/system record?). Perhaps the file extension idea is the least intrusive and least
complex (scout out the script path from the profile for the system, check for extension and set
the corresponding kernel option name, generate pxe file as usual).

I will take another look when I get some time and try the above out.

Tomas Bednar

Programmer Analyst

IT Support

Computer Science

University of Victoria

[http://itsupport.csc.uvic.ca]


On 10-06-24 2:59 PM, Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote: 
Scott Henson wrote:
  
At one point in the 1.x series we had limited support for Debian based
distros, but no one was using/testing that support, so with 2.0, it was
removed.  If you are willing to put the work in, we would love to
support Debian based distros.  I'm not entirely sure how much work it
would be to test it though.

    
I know of at least 3 parties that would be interested, myself not included. 
Then there's some parties interested in (Open)SUSE, and then some in Windows.

  
The first step would be to package cobbler on Debian.  This should be a
lot easier now that we have cleaned up the packaging on the Red Hat
side.  The setup.py should put things together in such a away that the
dpkg should be pretty straight forward.  If you want to try that and let
us know how it works, that would be great.

    
Actually, the first step would be to undo the commenting out of lines of code. 
Whether one deploys Cobbler on Debian, or deploys Debian with Cobbler are two 
different things.

FWIW, one important detail that I'm trying to tackle is accounting for the 
major difference between the layout of release media (.iso) and the contents 
of a mirror.

-- Jeroen

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