3:16 p.m.
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?
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 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?
--
Tomas Bednar
Programmer Analyst
IT Support
Computer Science
University of Victoria
[http://itsupport.csc.uvic.ca]
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4:43 p.m.
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
4:59 p.m.
Scott Henson wrote:
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.
I know of at least 3 parties that would be interested, myself not included.
Then there's some parties interested in (Open)SUSE, and then some in Windows.
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.
Actually, the first step would be to undo the commenting out of lines of code.
Whether one deploys Cobbler on Debian, or deploys Debian with Cobbler are two
different things.
FWIW, one important detail that I'm trying to tackle is accounting for the
major difference between the layout of release media (.iso) and the contents
of a mirror.
-- Jeroen
6:47 p.m.
Yes, I would be interested more in making cobbler deploy Ubuntu than
running on
it. Although, it would be nice to be able to do both.
In my mind, making pxegen.py config write function do the right thing when
generating a config for Ubuntu with both kickseed or preseeding, would
be a priority
... as this fails early on in the deployment phase and the manual fix is
not scalable.
(you really don't want to fudge the pxe config files by hand if you have
more than 2 systems ... and most certainly not if you have 200 ;-)
On the other hand, I don't know how many people are using kickseed.
In contrast, adding an Ubuntu distro may involve some manual effort at
this time,
but it is done once and does not need to be scaled to the number of systems.
Having said that, if any body can fix that ... great.
I took a look a the pxegen.py code and the fix is not entirely trivial.
This is due to the
fact that both kickstart (kickseed) and preseeding need to be supported.
Disabling the
said line will assume all Ubuntu deployments are using kickseed; leaving
it in assumes that all
Ubuntu deployments are using preseeding. Some mechanism for
distinguishing between
the two is needed (ks/preseed filename extension? code parsing, added
attribute in the
profile/system record?). Perhaps the file extension idea is the least
intrusive and least
complex (scout out the script path from the profile for the system,
check for extension and set
the corresponding kernel option name, generate pxe file as usual).
I will take another look when I get some time and try the above out.
Tomas Bednar
Programmer Analyst
IT Support
Computer Science
University of Victoria
[http://itsupport.csc.uvic.ca]
On 10-06-24 2:59 PM, Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
Scott Henson wrote:
> 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.
>
>
I know of at least 3 parties that would be interested, myself not included.
Then there's some parties interested in (Open)SUSE, and then some in Windows.
> 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.
>
>
Actually, the first step would be to undo the commenting out of lines of code.
Whether one deploys Cobbler on Debian, or deploys Debian with Cobbler are two
different things.
FWIW, one important detail that I'm trying to tackle is accounting for the
major difference between the layout of release media (.iso) and the contents
of a mirror.
-- Jeroen
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3:32 a.m.
On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 1:47 AM, Tomas Bednar <tbednar(a)cs.uvic.ca> wrote:
Yes, I would be interested more in making cobbler deploy Ubuntu than
running
on
it. Although, it would be nice to be able to do both.
In my mind, making pxegen.py config write function do the right thing
when
generating a config for Ubuntu with both kickseed or preseeding, would be a
priority
Current pxegen.py code assumes that both debian and ubuntu use preseeding
571 elif distro.breed == "debian" or distro.breed ==
"ubuntu":
572 append_line = "%s auto url=%s" % (append_line,
kickstart_path)
If you want all your ubuntus to use kickstart, just split this line.
If want to use either one or another, my suggestion is to add a new
ubuntu-ks breed. But if you want to use both simultaneously, I see no
easy path.
But, according kickseed documentation, you can supply whatever debconf
values you want in the kickseed file, so I don't see any strong reason
to use both simultaneously.
In contrast, adding an Ubuntu distro may involve some manual effort
at this
time,
but it is done once and does not need to be scaled to the number of systems.
Having said that, if any body can fix that ... great.
Maybe you will import the distro only once. But you will probably want
to update it from time to time.
The structure of debian media and repositories is completelly
different from redhat approach, and including support for
debian/ubuntu imports and repositories is by far much less trivial
than support kickseed and preseeding at the same time.
Javier Palacios
9:48 a.m.
Tomas Bednar wrote:
Yes, I would be interested more in making cobbler deploy Ubuntu than
running on
it. Although, it would be nice to be able to do both.
In my mind, making pxegen.py config write function do the right thing when
generating a config for Ubuntu with both kickseed or preseeding, would
be a priority
... as this fails early on in the deployment phase and the manual fix is
not scalable.
I was talking about the import phase though, way before the deployment phase.
With an import, Cobbler currently requires "kickstart", which would,
presumably, either be a preseed or kickseed.
As far as the import phase is concerned though, this may as well be an empty
file.
-- Jeroen
1:25 p.m.
On Thu, 24 Jun 2010 23:59:23 +0200, Jeroen van Meeuwen <kanarip(a)kanarip.com> wrote:
Scott Henson wrote:
> 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.
>
I know of at least 3 parties that would be interested, myself not included.
Then there's some parties interested in (Open)SUSE, and then some in Windows.
I may have mentioned this, but we also have someone working on vmware
and a bsd of some sort. I would love to see cobbler support more
distros from a deployment stand point.
> 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.
>
Actually, the first step would be to undo the commenting out of lines of code.
Whether one deploys Cobbler on Debian, or deploys Debian with Cobbler are two
different things.
I mentioned install because right now we are working on cleaning up the
way cobbler installs. I am not opposed to starting elsewhere, that was
just my suggestion.
As for uncommenting the code, if you can test that the current code
works, I would be fine accepting a patch to do that. I just can't
verify that the code works, so I can't really uncomment it.
FWIW, one important detail that I'm trying to tackle is
accounting for the
major difference between the layout of release media (.iso) and the contents
of a mirror.
What I would like to do is move all of the breed specific parts into
modules. That should make the import (and other places) code cleaner,
and make it easy to see what code needs to be written to add a new
breed.
The one part I am not clear on is how to detect which breed. I'm
thinking a file based regular expression of some kind. Something that
can be passed to fnmatch.filter or some such.
For the redhat breed, I would say look for RPM-GPG-*. That seems to
mark the beginning of all the Fedoras and Red Hat ELs. Is there
something similar for other breeds? Does another breed also have
RPM-GPG-* files (looking SUSE)?
For clarity sake, a breed is a group of distros that can all be treated
the same by import. For instance, Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux
are both in the redhat breed. I would assume that Debian and Ubuntu
would both be in the debian breed. So on and so forth.
--
Scott Henson
Red Hat CIS Operator
WVU Alum BSAE/BSME
10:13 p.m.
<snip>
For clarity sake, a breed is a group of distros that can all be
treated
the same by import. For instance, Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux
are both in the redhat breed. I would assume that Debian and Ubuntu
would both be in the debian breed. So on and so forth.
Scott, Does 'oracle unbreakable linux', and maybe scientific linux, fall
with in that same 'breed'??
R,
-Joe Wulf
5063
days inactive
5073
days old
cobbler@lists.fedorahosted.org
7 comments
5 participants
participants (5)
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Javier Palacios -
Jeroen van Meeuwen -
Joe_Wulf -
Scott Henson -
Tomas Bednar