JAmes Atwill wrote:
----- "Matthew Barr" <mbarr(a)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