This is a neat feature, but takes some explaining. Previously we have been able to support things like memtest through special code, we found the image if installed and added it to certain PXE configs. However you couldn't easily do things like make MAC address AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF automatically boot memtest, and so forth.
Now, imagine that special code didn't exist and we could do it generically. Also imagine that we weren't booting something as lame as memtest. What if we could easily boot anything we wanted, just as we can deal with kernels and initrds? Now we can. cobbler image add --name=SuperAwesomeLiveEnvironment --file=/opt/live.iso Though we don't have to imagine it, we have this on the devel branch now. Admittedly, I still tested with memtest and not SuperAwesomeLiveEnvironment, though the concept is entirely the same :) Further, we can do things like assign a specific MAC address to boot that live environment: cobbler system add --name=fooserver --mac=AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF --image=SuperAwesomeLiveEnvironment The next time that system boots, it will boot that image. This doesn't have to be an installation related image, it might just be a firmware update disk. Note that I didn't use --profile here, I used --image. One of cobbler's goals is to be able to break down the abstraction between physical and virtual machines. Here we are able to use "cobbler image" objects (with cobbler/koan 1.1 and later) to do installs both physically and virtually. The ability to netboot a live-image plays critically into our desire to support net-deploying live image cloning environments, and may also have applications for Stateless environments (LTSP thin clients?). Note that as with cobbler profiles, you can also assign arbitrary "append" options (i..e kernel options) to images. We could also use this to streamline our existing support to memtest, but since that is already "automatic" and relatively clever (it adds it automatically if you have memtestx86+ installed) we probably will leave that as is. Anyhow, feel free to test this feature out on the devel branch with any bootable images. I will say adding this feature was relatively complicated, so with the image support, testing will be very welcome to see if we run into any problems. No changes are in place for any existing profiles or system objects, just note that now systems can also "inherit" from images, or profiles, but not both at the same time. We still need to update the WebUI to take advantage of these features. So, please help test this out, and if everything is good we'll see about updating the Wiki to show how to use this with other tools, such as the firmware update images that are already out there... and we can also do some more testing with live environments and maybe even stateless applications. --Michael _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list [email protected] https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
