How Anaconda Detects Hard Drives
by Bob Cochran
Greetings,
I have a system which is essentially a network attached storage server.
It has FreeNAS 8.2.0 running on it from a USB flash drive, and
approximately 12 Tb of RAIDed storage across 9 hard drives. These drives
are connected to two (2) IBM M1015 SAS host adapters. (Forgive me, I'm
still new to network storage and didn't understand I can use an SAS
expander in combination with the SAS HBAs until yesterday.)
There is a 10th hard drive which is an SSD drive and which is not
connected to anything right now -- not to the SAS HBAs and not to the
SuperMicro motherboard's SATA ports.
I want to connect this SSD drive to the box and then use Cobbler to
install Fedora 17 specifically to the SSD. The Fedora installation will
become a virtual machine host and will run a bunch of guests that do
various things. In fact I want to turn FreeNAS into a vm.
My question is, do I need to disconnect all the NAS hard drives in order
to make certain that anaconda won't decide to format and use a storage
drive instead of the SSD? I would rather not risk the data that is on
those storage drives. Or is there a kickstart option to show me a list
of the enumerated hard drives and let me pick the one for the Fedora 17
install?
If I plug the SSD into the motherboard's SATA connector, will that
automatically be assigned /dev/sda if no other SATA ports on the
motherboard are in use? What if I plug in an SAS host adapter line instead?
Thanks for your thoughts
Bob Cochran
11 years, 6 months
Re: [cobbler] Cobbler 2.2 branch's support for Ubuntu and FreeBSD
by Zack Perry
Hi Jörgen,
Thanks for sharing your experience. For everyone's good, lets compare notes then.
We use import for quick testing, we certainly can mirror Ubuntu's official repo too. After importing, we got:
Initrd /var/www/cobbler/ks_mirror/ubuntu/install/initrd.gz
Kernel : /var/www/cobbler/ks_mirror/ubuntu/install/vmlinuz
But as I noted in my first post: these two do not allow network installation. The PXE part will work but then the network install would stall due to inability to do network communication.
We got around by using the following:
Initrd : /var/www/cobbler/ks_mirror/ubuntu-x86_64/install/netboot/ubuntu-installer/amd64/initrd.gz
Kernel : /var/www/cobbler/ks_mirror/ubuntu-x86_64/install/netboot/ubuntu-installer/amd64/linux
But even with these two, don't expect smooth sailing!
> Note: i dont use the import distro feature
>
> There's also a bug in the initrd as shipped with 12.04 wrt to the
> installer when using a custom mirror (the installer is replacing
> your specified mirror with gb.archive.ubuntu.com if i recall
> correctly). I worked around it by downloading an daily cdrom image
> and use the kernel/initrd from that.
Similar to what we did as shown above.
IMHO this is not really a cobbler's fault. But Ubuntu's. I have a
rather dim view about using Ubuntu for running servers, especially
heavily virtualized ones. The bridge networking defaults, the inability to keep certain sysctl settings persistently (a bug that got reported back in 2006 and still not fixed yet!) and so on. Don't
even get me started :-(
> --
> Jörgen
OK, so in summary, starting from 2.2.3, Ubuntu support is workable, if one knows how to get around *Ubuntu's bugs*. James, any comments from you?
Now onto BSD, that's for our "spare time" :-)
Regards,
-- Zack
[...]
11 years, 6 months
Cobbler 2.2 branch's support for Ubuntu and FreeBSD
by Zack Perry
We are running 2.2.3-2 on a host running Scientific Linux 6.3.
In this past two days, my colleague and I have tried to PXE boot Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server (note, it's 12.04, not 12.04.1). After quite a lot trial and errors, we got the PXE boot setup partially going - partially, because Ubuntu 12.04 LTS has a bad apt-get bug that may cause PXE-boot failures randomly.
In short, our experience is not pleasant. Despite info from https://github.com/cobbler/cobbler/wiki/Distribution%20support and https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Cobbler/Import may give the impression that everything should be ready to go, the reality is far from it.
A couple of examples:
0. The initrd and kernel attributes of the import-generated distro are useless.
1. The import doesn't create a ready to use distro and profile. Unless, the --os-version is specified.
1. is particularly subtle: The PXE part will work - the to be PXE-booted client will download kernel and initrd and boot into installer, but it seems that this installer is not able to talk to network (interfaces will be down, and no dhcp request for an address will occur) and finally it will complain about not being able to mount cdrom! We got around by replacing these two entries with what Ubuntu provides for netboot.
There are other issues with Ubuntu's kickstart support too.
The mailing list archive doesn't seem to have significant information either.
What should we do if we would like to support Ubuntu and FreeBSD? Should we move to the 2.4 branch? Will we have an easier life w.r.t. Ubuntu and FreeBSD support?
Regards,
-- Zack
11 years, 6 months
Internal Erroir When Adding Cobbler System
by Bob Cochran
I get this error when attempting to add a cobbler "system" and then edit it.
[root@cobbler1 kickstarts]# cobbler system add --name=t2
--profile=fedora17-x86_64
[root@cobbler1 kickstarts]# cobbler system edit --name=t2
--gateway=192.168.1.1 --hostname=kp58.greenbeltcomputer.biz
internal error, unknown system name t2
[root@cobbler1 kickstarts]# cobbler --version
Cobbler 2.3.1
source: fe5500d, Mon Oct 1 18:00:34 2012 -0700
build time: Wed Oct 3 10:38:46 2012
How do I fix the problem?
Thanks,
Bob Cochran
11 years, 6 months
Virtualization Host Kickstart
by Bob Cochran
Hi!
I want to put one of my Opteron boxes to better use and have it run a
bunch of virtual machines. Each VM will have a specific job.
I am under the impression that Fedora 17 x86_64 might be the best choice
of virtual machine host, and I have this distro installed under cobbler.
I also have CentOS 6.2 x86_64 installed as a cobbler distro, and I could
use that as a host as well. Or I could get some other OS and install
that into cobbler as a distro.
With that understanding, I think my game plan is supposed to run like this:
1. First I install my virtual machine host with cobbler. I just craft a
kickstart that installs Fedora 17 to the machine that will run all the
VMs. The kickstart file that cobbler will use doesn't need to be fancy.
I only need to install the @base and @Virtualization package groups. I
shouldn't even need X.
2. Then install each of the virtual machine guests one by one using
koan. Each of these will need their own individual kickstart files.
Am I on the right track here?
Thanks
Bob Cochran
11 years, 6 months
Cobbler + Puppet Setup
by Ronald J. Yacketta
Hello all!
Looking for some decent documentation on setup Cobbler and Puppet. We
currently have a working Cobbler system that has been in place for over a
year now and would like to integrate Pupput into the fold.
Scoured google but found bits and pieces with nothing really going through
a soup to nuts setup / example.
-Ron
11 years, 6 months
How to enable /etc/cobbler/dnsmasq.template to support different Mac Addresses for the same IP?
by Zack Perry
I am in need of using the the same set of IP addresses to support a group of KVM guests running different Linux distros on the same machine: Scientific Linux 6.3, 64 bit. cobbler 2.2.3.
With cobbler, to enable such the support of duplicated IPs is simple: vi /etc/cobbler/settings and done.
But to my disappointment, the $insert_cobbler_system_definitions in /etc/cobbler/dnsmasq.template writes out a line for each known Mac address. The result: upon a cobbler sync, dnsmasq issues the following and refuses to restart:
dnsmasq: duplicate IP address 192.168.123.101 in dhcp-config directive.
It's been known at least since 2009 that if one uses a syntax like the following:
dhcp-host=<wlan MAC>,<lan MAC>,<IP address>
then dnsmasq would handle the situation gracefully. How can I make cobbler to use such a syntax?
Yes. I can use the same set of Mac addresses for these KVM guests and "get around" the issue for now. But we do have plan to migrate this single host KVM based POC setup to a set of physical test server for more capacity. So, using different Mac Addresses is just more realistic and forward looking.
Thanks,
--Zack
11 years, 6 months
slow PXE boot when primary NIC unplugged
by Robert Jacobson
I need some help with a PXE/TFTP problem. My cobbler server has two
NICs; the "primary" is connected to the 'net, and the secondary is
dedicated to a deployment LAN.
DHCP and PXE/TFTP work very well when both NICs are connected. However,
when I disconnect the primary (internet) NIC, TFTP does some ... weird
things
When I PXE boot a system that isn't defined in cobbler (because I want
to just use the boot menu), the search for the boot file takes 20
seconds between each failure:
Trying to load: pxelinux.cfg/44454c4c-4a00-1057-8035-cac04f314431
[~20 second pause...]
Trying to load: pxelinux.cfg/01-00-19-b9-cd-8c-43
[~20 second pause...]
Trying to load: pxelinux.cfg/C0A80A69
[~20 second pause...]
Trying to load: pxelinux.cfg/C0A80A6
[etc...]
(full log at http://pastebin.com/rnrzE95d)
This problem does not occur when the primary NIC is connected. When its
connected, it still searches, but each one immediately fails, until it
gets to pxelinux.cfg/default -- then it gives me the menu as expected.
The whole process takes under 1 second.
Also, if I start a PXE boot with the primary disconnected, then connect
the primary NIC while the boot is stalled, it returns to its normal
speedy boot.
Not sure if relevant -- In "settings" my "manage_dns" is 0.
Any ideas what is causing the delay?
--
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Robert Jacobson Robert.C.Jacobson(a)nasa.gov
Lead System Admin Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)
Bldg 14, E222 (301) 286-1591
11 years, 7 months
ESXi5 system builds via cobbler
by Eddie Velez
I am working with our development lab to install ESXi5 on system via cobbler. ESXi4 and ESXi5 are different in the they boot I have modified /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cobbler/pxegen.py to handle this and created templates to make sure correct boot options are inserted to tftp boot file. The problem I am facing is coping all necessary files into /tftpboot/images directory and make sure they don't get deleted next time I do a cobbler sync. Can some please point me to which file I have to modify to copy data to directory.
________________________________
Eddie Velez
Sr. UNIX System Administrator
2650 N 1st Suit 300
San Jose, CA, 95135
408.904.4136 Office
408.307.1632 Mobile
http://www.emulex.com<http://www.emulex.com/>
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11 years, 7 months
