Ubuntu deployment support in Cobbler

[Tomas Bednar]

Hi folks.

I have been using cobbler to deploy Scientific Linux for about two years and
with some fudging (lost each update, but hey), I was able to make it 
work for me.
I am very happy which most of the features of cobbler and it made my 
life easier.
I am thankful to all that put effort in making such a fine piece of 
software.

We are now switching to Ubuntu and it would be great to be able to deploy
a few hundred Ubuntu machines using cobbler as well. Unfortunately, cobbler
does not currently support Ubuntu (despite the claims to the contrary).  Is
any work being done on this, or am I barking up the wrong tree and should
be looking for a different deployment solution instead?

I created a ticket for a clear show-stopper (Ubuntu supported kickstart
fails invariably at PXE boot ...  manually editing the PXE boot config 
for each
system after each sync is not an option). The ticket number is #589.
No activity that I could detect on this one.
(I hope the answer here is not ... use preseeding. I would if you could 
pass
values to the script the way you can to a kickstart script)

This is not the only thing that does not work. Beside some convenience 
features
I can live without (the widely discussed import), there are serious 
issues that I am
not willing to look past e.g.
- no Ubuntu repos can be created by cobbler
- no local mirrors can be created by cobbler

... the list goes on.  Making mirrors manually and adding fudge commands 
to the
%post install section of a kickstart (or what have you), does solve some 
of the
problems, but does not make Cobbler support those missing features ;-)

I guess my question would be then: Is there any serious intent to 
support Ubuntu?

-- 

Tomas Bednar

Programmer Analyst

IT Support

Computer Science

University of Victoria

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


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