I know, installation server with batteries included... but we've got this connection to the power grid already up and running and would like to use that but still use cobbler. :)
Basically, we've got a mirror server already. It has plenty of resources, and it's set up to automatically sync and so on. I'd therefore like to avoid duplicating effort (and wasting disk space) in cobbler, and point entirely at that remote mirror. The "Non-Import (Manual) Workflow" with --mirror-locally=N seems to get us part way there, but we still need to do things like "distro add" pointing to local kernel/initrd files
This can't be that uncommon of a use case, can it? I must be missing something. Is there a secret way to distro add (or better yet "cobbler import") with the equivalent of --mirror-locally=N?
Thanks!
(Oh, related question: if one is doing --mirror-locally=N, does cobbler reposync do anything?)
On Wed, Apr 07, 2010 at 11:28:51AM -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
Basically, we've got a mirror server already. It has plenty of resources, and it's set up to automatically sync and so on. I'd therefore like to avoid duplicating effort (and wasting disk space) in cobbler, and point entirely at that remote mirror. The "Non-Import (Manual) Workflow" with --mirror-locally=N seems to get us part way there, but we still need to do things like "distro add" pointing to local kernel/initrd files
We also mirror ourself and let cobbler just work on that. For it to manage pxefiles etc. it has to know about vmlinuz/initrd of the distros thou, manage profiles. I am not sure what funktionality you would like to get from cobbler without having pxe/dhcp-management - and for this cobbler needs to know about the distro/profile objects.
Christian
On Wed, Apr 07, 2010 at 05:59:03PM +0200, Christian Horn wrote:
We also mirror ourself and let cobbler just work on that. For it to manage pxefiles etc. it has to know about vmlinuz/initrd of the distros thou, manage profiles.
Yeah, fair enough. I guess what I'd like is for it to automatically mirror just the bits it needs for that with 'reposync'.
I did what I think you want to do by using a manually modified setup for a while. I have rsync'd copies of the yum repos that I manage externally to cobbler and I wanted to use my copy of the "Everything" repo instead of the ISO. I became annoyed at myself since I was frequently replacing/reprovisioning and updating cobbler. I used --available-as to point to remote copies of the Everything/$arch/os tree, but IIRC that didn't quite handle my desired situation perfectly.
The "tree" definition is easy enough to modify, but now I: * import the distro from the DVD iso * delete (JUST!) the yum repository from the sync'd distro. Just Packages and repodata. It was never going to change and I have a superset of those packages elsewhere( ie. "Everything") * replace the tree reference in the distro config with the "Everything" repository http location.
Now I have a few additional files in my cobbler directory, but nothing I can't live with, and the cobbler server is somewhat easier to reprovision. It's essentially what I did before but with less knowledge work. :)
My current setup works well, but only because every cobbler-provisioned machine can reach both the cobbler server and the web server that actually hosts the rsync'd repositories. Since puppet handles all of my yum repo definitions, I don't even import the repos into cobbler with --available-as any longer. I just rm -rf /etc/yum.repos.d/* in my %post and set puppet to auto-sign for my subnets. Puppet then generates the yum defs, and since all of my puppet configs require the correct Yum[] definition, they're guaranteed to be there first.
Doing a cobbler update of images and links by hand seemed cumbersome to me, and very much like "jumping off the boat". However, I can certainly see how my way would look equally or more cumbersome.
YMMV.
Mykel
-----Original Message----- From: cobbler-bounces@lists.fedorahosted.org [mailto:cobbler-bounces@lists.fedorahosted.org] On Behalf Of Christian Horn Sent: Wednesday, April 07, 2010 8:59 AM To: cobbler mailing list Subject: Re: cobbler with no local mirroring?
On Wed, Apr 07, 2010 at 11:28:51AM -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
Basically, we've got a mirror server already. It has plenty of resources, and it's set up to automatically sync and so on. I'd therefore like to avoid duplicating effort (and wasting disk space) in cobbler, and point entirely at that remote mirror. The "Non-Import (Manual) Workflow" with --mirror-locally=N seems to get us part way there, but we still need to do things like "distro add" pointing to local kernel/initrd files
We also mirror ourself and let cobbler just work on that. For it to manage pxefiles etc. it has to know about vmlinuz/initrd of the distros thou, manage profiles. I am not sure what funktionality you would like to get from cobbler without having pxe/dhcp-management - and for this cobbler needs to know about the distro/profile objects.
Christian
Sorry to resurrect a thread from a while ago, but I'm dealing with the same issue here. We've got a nice fat internal mirror with plenty of resources. We added a repo using --available-as (well, actually using cobbler-web with Advanced -> "Mirror locally" disabled and the relevant repo data seems to come in, however on the distro side it still needs a Kernel and Initrd local file path to copy over to /tftpboot/images/DISTRO/vmlinuz/initrd . Placing the files there manually of course results in them being wiped the next time I do a cobbler sync.
Even if we have to specify the location for each distro manually still, I'm fine with that... but I'd like to be able to specify a URL here (in lieu of an Absolute path) and have cobbler simply pull that down as it's doing its sync -- e.g., http://rhel.mirrors.example.net/5.90Server/i386/os/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz
Any pointers to the python code I'd need to hack to make this happen?
Regards,
-jc
-----Original Message----- From: cobbler-bounces@lists.fedorahosted.org [mailto:cobbler-bounces@lists.fedorahosted.org] On Behalf Of Christian Horn Sent: Wednesday, April 07, 2010 8:59 AM To: cobbler mailing list Subject: Re: cobbler with no local mirroring?
On Wed, Apr 07, 2010 at 11:28:51AM -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
Basically, we've got a mirror server already. It has plenty of
resources,
and it's set up to automatically sync and so on. I'd therefore like to
avoid
duplicating effort (and wasting disk space) in cobbler, and point
entirely
at that remote mirror. The "Non-Import (Manual) Workflow" with --mirror-locally=N seems to get us part way there, but we still need
to do
things like "distro add" pointing to local kernel/initrd files
We also mirror ourself and let cobbler just work on that. For it to manage pxefiles etc. it has to know about vmlinuz/initrd of the distros thou, manage profiles. I am not sure what funktionality you would like to get from cobbler without having pxe/dhcp-management - and for this cobbler needs to know about the distro/profile objects.
Christian
Sorry to resurrect a thread from a while ago, but I'm dealing with the same issue here. We've got a nice fat internal mirror with plenty of resources. We added a repo using --available-as (well, actually using cobbler-web with Advanced -> "Mirror locally" disabled and the relevant repo data seems to come in, however on the distro side it still needs a Kernel and Initrd local file path to copy over to /tftpboot/images/DISTRO/vmlinuz/initrd . Placing the files there manually of course results in them being wiped the next time I do a cobbler sync.
Even if we have to specify the location for each distro manually still, I'm fine with that... but I'd like to be able to specify a URL here (in lieu of an Absolute path) and have cobbler simply pull that down as it's doing its sync -- e.g., http://rhel.mirrors.example.net/5.90Server/i386/os/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz
Any pointers to the python code I'd need to hack to make this happen?
Regards,
-jc
cobbler mailing list cobbler@lists.fedorahosted.org https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
What we do is mount disc one iso (via loop back) of a release or the dvd and then import using --available-as, this allows cobbler to pull in the bits to build out PXE cruft.
-Ron
On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 10:38 PM, Cleaver, Japheth jcleaver@soe.sony.com wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: cobbler-bounces@lists.fedorahosted.org [mailto:cobbler-bounces@lists.fedorahosted.org] On Behalf Of Christian Horn Sent: Wednesday, April 07, 2010 8:59 AM To: cobbler mailing list Subject: Re: cobbler with no local mirroring?
On Wed, Apr 07, 2010 at 11:28:51AM -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
Basically, we've got a mirror server already. It has plenty of resources, and it's set up to automatically sync and so on. I'd therefore like to avoid duplicating effort (and wasting disk space) in cobbler, and point entirely at that remote mirror. The "Non-Import (Manual) Workflow" with --mirror-locally=N seems to get us part way there, but we still need to do things like "distro add" pointing to local kernel/initrd files
We also mirror ourself and let cobbler just work on that. For it to manage pxefiles etc. it has to know about vmlinuz/initrd of the distros thou, manage profiles. I am not sure what funktionality you would like to get from cobbler without having pxe/dhcp-management - and for this cobbler needs to know about the distro/profile objects.
Christian
Sorry to resurrect a thread from a while ago, but I'm dealing with the same issue here. We've got a nice fat internal mirror with plenty of resources. We added a repo using --available-as (well, actually using cobbler-web with Advanced -> "Mirror locally" disabled and the relevant repo data seems to come in, however on the distro side it still needs a Kernel and Initrd local file path to copy over to /tftpboot/images/DISTRO/vmlinuz/initrd . Placing the files there manually of course results in them being wiped the next time I do a cobbler sync.
Even if we have to specify the location for each distro manually still, I'm fine with that... but I'd like to be able to specify a URL here (in lieu of an Absolute path) and have cobbler simply pull that down as it's doing its sync -- e.g., http://rhel.mirrors.example.net/5.90Server/i386/os/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz
Hmm, I think I did some work on this awhile back, you can edit the distro and specify a URL to a kernel/initrd today. I believe I had this working for koan installs but it looks like I didn't get it all the way for pxe.
You could probably get it up and running without too much effort. Scott's recently done some work around syncing and pxegen which isn't yet in master, and this is what you'd want to work off. (git://github.com/shenson/cobbler.git branch fastsync)
Check out pxegen.py copy_single_distro_files. Looks like you'd need to handle fetching the files if they're not on the local filesystem and proceed. Definitely a bug here currently if you try to use URLs to your kernel/initrd, the file copy is skipped, but profiles referencing this distro still land in pxelinux.cfg/default pointing to files that didn't get copied.
Hope that helps!
Cheers,
Devan
On Thu, Jul 08, 2010 at 06:38:51PM -0700, Cleaver, Japheth wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: cobbler-bounces@lists.fedorahosted.org [mailto:cobbler-bounces@lists.fedorahosted.org] On Behalf Of Christian Horn Subject: Re: cobbler with no local mirroring?
We also mirror ourself and let cobbler just work on that. For it to manage pxefiles etc. it has to know about vmlinuz/initrd of the distros thou, manage profiles. I am not sure what funktionality you would like to get from cobbler without having pxe/dhcp-management - and for this cobbler needs to know about the distro/profile objects.
Christian
Sorry to resurrect a thread from a while ago, but I'm dealing with the same issue here. We've got a nice fat internal mirror with plenty of resources. We added a repo using --available-as [..]
Even if we have to specify the location for each distro manually still, I'm fine with that... but I'd like to be able to specify a URL here (in lieu of an Absolute path) and have cobbler simply pull that down as it's doing its sync -- e.g., http://rhel.mirrors.example.net/5.90Server/i386/os/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz
Considered simply mounting the distro as offered by the remote server via nfs onto the cobbler-box? If the remote box only offers port80-services even offering the distro also as webdav and mounting it on the cobbler-box could work.
Christian
cobbler@lists.fedorahosted.org