++ for hierarchial menus, wanted to do this for a long time, though I *have* seen PXE systems basically implode with very large menu configs. I think the initial reason for not doing it was also that, at the time, we had to contend with older syslinuxes where they were buggy. I think in those cases we should just tell folks to pull down a newer one, and not require that the one in the distro be used at all.
Folks could have tons of systems (tens of thousands) and we'd have to test that to find the breaking points, and to see if there's a menu size at which things stop working.
If you did systems, you could partition based on the first few letters, like
systems/a/aa/aardvark
Basically for non-systems you could do something like:
cobbler profile edit --name=bar --pxe-menu-path="alpha/beta/gamma"
with the default menu path being "" for root.
Though it does open up the case of being able to easily install the wrong system record on a system, so I'd question why you would do it interactively if you could avoid it. And possibly some trivial-to-exploit security tricks, where you could easily clone what a system was supposed to get in a bit too easy of a way (though it could be argued any attempt to defeat this are futile due to the natures of the protocols involved anyway).
The main point is doing a lot of system customization is really doing it wrong, IMHO, as ultimately profiles should be driving something like puppet external nodes for more advanced config.... and if you have PXE, you can skip the menu navigation. And if you don't.... then you didn't get into the menu to begin with.
--Michael
On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 7:57 PM, James Cammarata jimi@sngx.net wrote:
On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 6:13 PM, Michael DeHaan michael.dehaan@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 3:52 PM, Scot Floess sfloess@redhat.com wrote: In any event, no need for menus. It would get unmanageable with large system counts (scroooooollll.....), and I'd really want to encourage everyone using profiles as much as possible, with systems as just the "glue" to make a system "be" a profile, plus whatever bare minimum info about it's power management or special kernel options, etc.
A few months back, someone requested a feature that would add hierarchical menus, which would solve the issue of having a ton of systems but no MAC addresses. It's on my todo list, as I do think it would be a helpful feature for both PXE booting and ISOs. _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list cobbler@lists.fedorahosted.org https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler