Re: Ubuntu deployment support in Cobbler
On Wed, 16 Jun 2010 13:16:26 -0700, Tomas Bednar <tbednar(a)cs.uvic.ca> wrote:
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?
At one point in the 1.x series we had limited support for Debian based
distros, but no one was using/testing that support, so with 2.0, it was
removed. If you are willing to put the work in, we would love to
support Debian based distros. I'm not entirely sure how much work it
would be to test it though.
The first step would be to package cobbler on Debian. This should be a
lot easier now that we have cleaned up the packaging on the Red Hat
side. The setup.py should put things together in such a away that the
dpkg should be pretty straight forward. If you want to try that and let
us know how it works, that would be great.
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 looks like we should just be able to kill out some special case
code in pxegen.py. If you want to have a look at line 571 of
pxegen.py[0], I think a patch to fix the issue would be pretty straight
forward (just remove some code?).
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?
Import and repo code should not be impossible. But it will take someone
who is dedicated to seeing Debian support included to get it done.
[0] -
http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=cobbler;a=blob;f=cobbler/pxegen.py;hb=...
--
Scott Henson
Red Hat CIS Operator
WVU Alum BSAE/BSME