Provisioning a cluster

[Waldron, Michael H]

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.

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?

Mike Waldron

[Locane]

At work, myself and some other developers are working on a (much more
complex) system that reads MACs out of DHCP logs and then generates a file
for the connecting system.  You could do it that way.

On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 1:15 PM, Waldron, Michael H <mwaldron(a)email.unc.edu&gt;
wrote:

>  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.
>
>  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?
>
>  Mike Waldron
>
>
>
>  _______________________________________________
>  cobbler mailing list
>  cobbler(a)lists.fedorahosted.org
>  https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
>
>

[Scott Mattan]

I ended up making my own solution... although its not very secure you could
probably do something like this within the kickstart through snippets.

1. install wget
2. download epel
3. install koan and other required tools
4. setup bmc and system using ipmitools and system acquired variables
5. register with cobbler using acquired variables
6. set the register the bmc settings with cobbler

This is basically a brief outline of how I have my setup to complete
automated installs... its a complete hack and not very clean but it gets
the job done until I get around to cleaning it up and doing it through
proper programming.

for the record, I couldn't get the cobbler_register script to work
either... although I didn't try for too long.

Scott

*************************************************
マッタン・スコット 【Mattan, Scott】
クラウド・ソリューション・エンジニア
ニスコム株式会社
*************************************************

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 6:15 AM, Waldron, Michael H <mwaldron(a)email.unc.edu&gt;
wrote:

>  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.
>
>  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?
>
>  Mike Waldron
>
>
>
>  _______________________________________________
>  cobbler mailing list
>  cobbler(a)lists.fedorahosted.org
>  https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
>
>

[André Gemünd]

>  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(a)scai.fraunhofer.de 
Tel: [phone] 
/C=DE/O=Fraunhofer/OU=SCAI/OU=People/CN=Andre Gemuend