Re: Ideas around auto registration
On Fri, 31 Dec 2010 10:55:36 -0500, Jean-Francois Nadeau <jfnadeau(a)taleo.com>
wrote:
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.
Independent of the BMC in what way? We use the BMC currently to do
power management, I'm curious how you currently use them.
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.
We have a similar issue. We end up putting all interfaces into cobbler
and then having some logic in the kickstarts sort things out. I find
the easiest way to figure out which interface has access to cobbler is
to dhcp over the interfaces till one works.
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.
>From the func master being also the cobbler server, I know which servers are ready to
be kickstarted and can rename/assign their profiles easier, translating serial numbers
into hostnames. I can also push firmware updates, create RAID arrays and perform some
inventory tasks.
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.
It feels a bit complex to me, but everything you have listed there seem
doable. I would shy away from a 'live' image and go with a default
profile/install. But I tend to shy away from images out of habit.
As for extending the auto-registration feature to have other fields. It
is basically only limited by the information that cobbler can store. I
thought about expanding the comment field to be able to take complex
data structures (aka a python dict), but I've not really had any need
for it. I'm definitely willing to do that if people would find use for
it. Perhaps even call it something else and leave the comment field
alone.
--
Scott Henson
Red Hat CIS Operator
WVU Alum BSAE/BSME
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