On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 12:47, Gerhardus Geldenhuis < gerhardus.geldenhuis(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > Hi > > This page: https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/CobblerApi states: > As of version 2.0, BootAPI is *not* the recommended way of interfacing > with Cobbler. It directly modifies the config store in a way that may not > be safe. Furthermore the modifications made will not be visible to > cobblerd. The CobblerXmlrpc<https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/CobblerXmlrpc> interface > should instead be used until at least version 2.2. > > Is this still true? Or can we use BootAPI now? > This is still true.

> Is there anyway to get error messages back when using xmlrpc? The > https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/CobblerXmlrpc page references > https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/CobblerExceptions but it does not > exist any more. I want to know if actions were successful or not. I suspect > error checking is better done with the api hence my question. > I'm not sure personally. I want to say I saw errors that I could deal with when using the xmlrpc, I just don't recall the format. I just pulled a small snippet that is the only error checking I did against the xmlrpc. here it is: try: cobbler.modify_system(sysid, 'modify_interface', int, token) except xmlrpclib.Fault, e: print "system %s errored trying to add %s interface" % (system, interface) print e not great, but hopefully it helps.

> One last novice question, does the api only run on the same server as > cobbler or can I use the api to access a remote cobbler server? > > The API should be remotely accessible.

This was changed due to the fact that both cobblerd and things interacting with the API might write files at the same time and the other would have no clue about it. This lead to a lot of weird race conditions and data loss, so it was decided everything should be done through cobblerd over xmlrpc. I have at times considered writting a REST API for cobbler, however I have not done so as I don't think there's any real demand for it.

On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 11:58 AM, Gerhardus Geldenhuis <gerhardus.geldenhuis(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 9:32 PM, James Cammarata <jimi(a)sngx.net&gt; wrote: >> >> This was changed due to the fact that both cobblerd and things >> interacting with the API might write files at the same time and the >> other would have no clue about it. This lead to a lot of weird race >> conditions and data loss, so it was decided everything should be done >> through cobblerd over xmlrpc. I have at times considered writting a >> REST API for cobbler, however I have not done so as I don't think >> there's any real demand for it. > > Thanks for the clarification James. Is there any point then in still having > the API or mentioning of it anyway? Would it not be less confusing to > archive mentioning of it on the wiki and concentrate on xmlrpc in the wiki? > I would be happy to do the legwork to get it done if there is enough > consensus. Probably wouldn't be a bad idea, knowledge of the boot api is only really required if you'd want to replace XMLRPC with some other system. Feel free to tackle it :)