I was going back through older mail and found this. We expect to
build a bunch of new boxes in the next few months, and I'd love to
have an easy way to add their mac's to Cobbler. We also have other
boxes that aren't in cobbler yet, that would be handy to be able to
run a koan command to add the MACs to a specific profile.
The base tool might be as simple as a koan option to register a new
profile. So workflow would be:
PXE boot. loads a quick shell to enter the name of machine, and the
IP. That adds the the new system record and reboots to kick the
system via a koan --replace-self.
Seems like it might be nice and easy, and despite needing a keyboard
attached at 1st power on, there would not be any typing of MAC
addresses. If you had a pattern for names, you could generate the
name, and IPs, and such things off a single line entry, scripted by
the end user.
We key off the rack and a machine number in the rack, so it's as easy
as typing in 2 numbers, and then hitting enter.
Annoying, because we have to console into each box, but necessary.
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
used to kick a rack of boxes that all get an ip range, but only want a
dynamic DHCP setup when they are uncrated, vs running all the time.
Thoughts?
On Jan 30, 2009, at 5:55 PM, Michael DeHaan wrote:
Jared Hodge wrote:
>> 2. Better baremetal building support without every connecting a
>> keyboard
> (i.e. I order the systems with PXE boot set). I see this mentioned
> in
> ticket 301. I don't know that the specific implementation suggested
> would be best - it would be best not to have any sort of "install" be
> the default, but if we can find a way of easily registering MAC
> addresses for assignment to profiles that would be very helpful.
>
https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/ticket/301
>
Thinking aloud, this could possibly be done with a special option
added
to koan and a kickstart that does that and then reboots in %pre before
any further installation occurs. This could be done using any
installer kernel/initrd as a basis.
(Adding and calling a koan --register, basically)
Sound workable? The underlying mechanics would be quite trivial.
------------------
Matthew Barr
InteractiveOne - Senior System Engineer
e:mbarr@interactiveone.com
c:646.765.6878
aim: matthewbarr1