Using the following in my kickstart template, I was able to render the mac address for eth0: $getVar('$mac_address_eth0') Confirmed working using the following command which prints out the rendered kickstart profile: cobbler system getks --name=<system_name> On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 9:58 AM, Luc de Louw <luc(a)delouw.ch&gt; wrote:

i see that you solved your problem, so i'm not attempting to assist, just offering some additional info for the community. we also had a need for identifying VMware systems, primarily for auto-installing VMware tools. however, using the MAC address was not an option for us as we can and will change MAC addresses on our systems, physical and virtual alike. i opted to use `dmidecode` to check the "Manufacturer" which is something like "VMware, Inc." on VMware VMs. however, there are many other ways to determine if a system is a VMware. for instance `lspci` will report the VGA adapter as "VMware SVGA II Adapter" on VMs as well. we do our VMware detection outside of cobbler in rc.local so that we can catch VMs and install the tools on first boot. i'm sure there are other ways of accomplishing the same goal, but rc.local seemed appropriate at the time. i can provide an example of this if anyone is interested. just FYI byron -----Original Message----- From: cobbler-bounces(a)lists.fedorahosted.org [mailto:cobbler-bounces@lists.fedorahosted.org] On Behalf Of Luc de Louw Sent: Tuesday, February 23, 2010 9:59 AM To: cobbler(a)lists.fedorahosted.org Subject: How to find out the MAC address of a system Dear all, I tried the VMWare detection snipped at https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/KickstartSnippets and it fails, no MAC address found. $system.interfaces['eth0']['mac_address'] does not show anything. cobbler system dumpvars --name=blah shows the mac_address as expected. Used cobbler version: 2.0.3 Any hints? Thanks, Luc _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list cobbler(a)lists.fedorahosted.org https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler

On 02/23/2010 04:11 PM, Kelsey Hightower wrote: I'm a bit concerned about the wiki entry at https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/KickstartSnippets because it figures out that it is simply not working with current cobbler versions. If nobody complains, I'm going to update the informations there. Thanks, Luc

glad to share it. i'm basically using a specific file to determine whether this is the first boot or not and touching the file after my first pass. then each subsequent run will notice the existence of the file and skip the first boot portion of the script. you'll also notice some RHEL registration code, i did this in rc.local and not with the builtin snippets because we have a satellite server and RHN (with different keys no doubt) so I use a ksmeta variable to build a file containing the necessary registration info. this allows me to register different systems with different RHN / satellite keys. the section of the script that runs at every boot simply checks to see if the VMware tools need to be rebuilt, typically due to a kernel upgrade. that last bit was taken pretty much verbatim from a post found on the wild wild web, i can't take credit for it. byron -------------rc.local------------- # run some stuff on the first boot if [ ! -e /etc/sysconfig/blah/firstboot ]; then # install vmware tools if this is a VM and it's the first boot if [ ! -e /etc/vmware-tools/ ] && /usr/sbin/dmidecode | grep -iq "product name: vmware virtual platform"; then echo "VMware detected" wget "http://X.X.X.X/prov/pkgs/vmwaretools.tgz" --output-document=/tmp/vmwaretools.tgz echo "Installing VMware tools" cd /tmp tar zxf vmwaretools.tgz cd vmware-tools-distrib/ /usr/bin/perl vmware-install.pl -d fi # if cobbler created the rhel_reg file let's register this system if [ -e /etc/sysconfig/swrx/rhel_reg ] && grep -iq "red.hat" /etc/redhat-release; then # the haldaemon needs to be running in order to register if /sbin/pidof hald; then # source the register variables . /etc/sysconfig/swrx/rhel_reg # register the system /usr/sbin/rhnreg_ks --serverUrl=$RHEL_URL --sslCACert=$RHEL_CERT --activationkey=$RHEL_KEY # update the system yum -y update fi fi # touch the firstboot file so the above code doesn't run anymore mkdir -p /etc/sysconfig/blah touch /etc/sysconfig/blah/firstboot # reboot system with new packages and kernel modules reboot else # code below this point will run every boot after the first # reinstall vmware tools if the kernel has updated on subsequent boots rkernel=`uname -r` if [ -e /etc/vmware-tools/not_configured ]; then echo "vmware-tools not configured for running kernel $rkernel" echo "running vmware-config-tools.pl" /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl -d echo "vmware-tools now compiled for running kernel $rkernel" echo "restarting networking" /etc/init.d/network restart echo "network restarted" fi fi exit 0 -------------rc.local----------------- -----Original Message----- From: cobbler-bounces(a)lists.fedorahosted.org [mailto:cobbler-bounces@lists.fedorahosted.org] On Behalf Of Joe Wulf Sent: Tuesday, February 23, 2010 3:39 PM To: cobbler mailing list Subject: Re: How to find out the MAC address of a system Byron, I am interested, thank you.