Javier Palacios wrote: > Hi, > > I've started to work in order to allow debian provisioning with > cobbler. I send attached two patches. > > The first on is actually not strictly related to debian, and it's a > reorganization of the archs management, > to simplify it and ease smooth addition of other distros: debian calls > amd64 to x86_64, and the idea is > to keep the RedHat names as canonical ones. > > The second one does actually allow to import the content of a debian > CD/DVD and create the corresponding > distro. It also creates the profile breeded as debian, although it > might not be usable yet. > > There are a couple of open questions that might affect other parts of > cobbler or where just ideas are required. > > - the kickstarts for debian. They are called "preseed", and are by far > much more complex than a standard > kickstart. Although not strictly required, it might be better to > have new names for both ks files and directories, >
Cobbler used to have the alias "--answer-file" for "--kickstart" though if added it should once again only be an alias, as opposed to having different field storage for the answer file. Essentially this is what we do already for --breed=debian (preseed) or --breed=suse (AutoYAST), both being supported already. For Ubuntu kickseeds, you just use --breed=redhat and need to be very careful with the contents of the kickseed. I have also been told kickseeds have been applied to upstream Debian, but haven't been able to validate this or know whether they are in fact a good option. I'll leave that for other people to answer. The other thing this import should do, that is very important, is to package a good default preseed so users can get a fully automated setup out of the box. Just creating the distro is pretty easy, the magic is in setting up something for a user who doesn't know how to write one that installs a base package set. > but I think that they can be easyly added to PXE boot options. To > make things worst, ubuntu does allow both > the standard debian preseed and kickstart files. > > - the package repositories. Debian follows a quite different approach, > and a single tree can hold many versions > and different architectures. Allowing a cobbler distro to have > multiple architectures might reduce the disk usage > and simplify the repository updating. Due to this fact, a single > debian media can install multiple archs, complexing > a little bit to import the media. > I've heard adding support for "cobbler repo" style objects would be difficult here. One option is to just not support them and require that they be managed out of band. > These are the only two points I see on the close horizon, but there > are probably more. It anyone has concerns > or ideas, they are welcome. And if anyone can actually test the > deployment (when it matures a little bit), much better. > > Javier Palacios > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > cobbler mailing list > [email protected] > https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list [email protected] https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
