Ideas around auto registration

Hi, I'm looking at cobbler to replace our actual home brewed kickstart system to ease 'off truck' scenarios. We currently rely on the servers BMC (Ilo's XMLRPC interface) to initiate our kickstarts and map a boot media. In this way it is easy to match the bare metal hardware with a system profile but I would like to have a solution independent of the BMC. Going forward with Cobbler and PXE based installs, I see a challenge with managing mac-adresses and linking them with a system profile as we have a lots of different server models with 2/4 nics and various network configuration where not all NICs can reach a cobbler server. I really like the auto-registration feature and I was thinking of using it the following way and get around the MAC address challenge: 1. Use a default system profile all 'off truck' servers will network boot to. The boot image is a custom CentOS 5 livecd with the following onboard: * Needed binaries to identify the hardware (dmidecode etc.) * Koan client * Func client * Utilities to create vendor RAID arrays and firmware updates * Utilities to configure BMC if still in vanilla state (IPMI tools / Hponcfg). * Fancy perl module used as a Cisco CDP querier 2. The image finds the server model, firmware, serial number and all possible NIC details 3. Cobbler-register creates the server's system entry using the server model and serial number since we have no idea of its hostname right now. 4. Func connects to its master and wait for commands. All is left is trigger a remote koan --replace-self with func to fire the install. b.t.w... I really like the hidden --kexec switch :-) Do you think I'm going a too complicated way or does this make sense to some of you ? I remember Michael had some thoughts about extending the auto-registration feature to include other fields but I have not seen much interest on the list. Happy new year, Jean-Francois Nadeau