----- "Matthew Barr" mbarr@communityconnect.com wrote:
I'm not sure how you'd distinguish each system from the next if you didn't manually tell the system what it's name was, but it could be
There's an amazing amount of information in dmidecode(8). Sometimes hardware asset tags or serial numbers are in there too.
I'd love a PXE booted environment that grabbed hardware info, registered it into cobbler and powered off when done. Bonus if it could do burn-in too. :)
JAmes
JAmes Atwill wrote:
----- "Matthew Barr" mbarr@communityconnect.com wrote:
I'm not sure how you'd distinguish each system from the next if you didn't manually tell the system what it's name was, but it could be
There's an amazing amount of information in dmidecode(8). Sometimes hardware asset tags or serial numbers are in there too.
I'd love a PXE booted environment that grabbed hardware info, registered it into cobbler and powered off when done. Bonus if it could do burn-in too. :)
JAmes
I'm feeling we should run with this. It seems like goodness.
(Side question: who's workflow for setting up machines involves setting the asset tags? And if so, what do you set them to?)
livecd-creator is easy enough, and basically all this would involve doing is writing a very clever kickstart for it that minded hal/dmidecode/etc in %post and then made an XMLRPC call to a new cobbler method.
cobbler system add --name=192.168.10.0/24 --profile=liveScanner
(it's basically just a few hours worth of work, and if we use F10 as the live environment, smolt could be used to get hardware info and avoid some parsing).
Initial goals would just be to populate the mac addresses and give the system a good name, and we could expand the saved data more as needed.
The steps involved would be to add the new method, add a cobbler setting so the registration is /off/ by default (I think we already have this at a basic level, if not, time to bring it back), and then write the kickstart snippet and livecd-creator instructions. We could then ship the livecd-creator script and kickstart file to input into it with cobbler, so people could build their own copy.
(Actually, Fedora has a mechanism for hosting ISOs, so people could just download it, in this case, we want not the ISO but the kernel + very large live initrd, so then it's just "cobbler distro add" to make it available to cobbler)
Sound good?
--Michael
cobbler@lists.fedorahosted.org