> Not necessarily. Is there any reason we couldn't extend cobbler to manage iscsi exports or other methods?
Well, it could do *anything* the question is, what would be the (cobbler) method, hypotehtical or otherwise, to configure it to work that way -- and why would you really need to? It seems like serving everything httpd for starters *off* of the Cobbler server makes good sense. > The issue here is the supported version of syslinux. Newer versions of > pxelinux support httpd natively, however RHEL/CentOS 5 (and 4 of > course) may not have access to those versions. This is a stop-gap for > the next 3-5 years in which we will support those distros. At some > point, we could revert back to a pure pxelinux implementation (or not, > if we do end up supporting stuff like iscsi and AoE). I'd be ok with requiring folks setting up a cobbler to just go get a new one and hosting it like we did with "cobbler get-loaders", even as ugly as that was. Older syslinuxes were a frequent cause of the hangs at the PXE boot menu anyway. > >> (I'm also a bit curious why VMware ESX won't boot from pxelinux.0, but >> that's just for my info and unrelated) > > It does - the limitation as I noted in the original email is that you > have to copy all of the ISO contents to the tftp directory. The ESXi5 > install supports httpd through gpxe only. In order to get that to work > with cobbler sync and the --boot-files option, some ugly hacks had to > be made allowing for globs so that all files would be copied. That > could become a management issue too, since for older distros /tftpboot > is in the root file system and may not have a ton of space available. So it doesn't really have a notion of an install tree like kickstart does? Yikes. You could always hardlink /tftpboot somewhere else if you had to. Would be nice to document all this here in terms of deploying the ESX boxes themselves: https://github.com/cobbler/cobbler/wiki/VMware -- which mostly pertains to launching guests and I'm sure is somewhat out of date not marking the difference between workstation/fusion and server. > >>> >>>> + ks_mirror_name = string.join(distro.kernel.split('/')[-2:-1],'') >>>> 862 >>>> >>>> FYI -- This seems to imply the distro must be mirrored by Cobbler. >>>> It seems like the code needs to anticipate this this possibility? >>> >>> Yes and no - there's no reason the http server in question has to be >>> cobbler. Covering that case would be a todo, but I didn't give it >>> priority since I believe the number of people who use the >>> --available-as option are relatively small. I'm pretty sure that >>> option doesn't work with esxi4 either (since at least 6 files need to >>> be copied to the tftp directory), so I figured the people who'd use >>> this feature right now for esxi5 wouldn't care about that limitation Maybe raise a warning then. Sounds like we need a seperate GPXE page on the Wiki or something. As long as it's documented what works and doesn't that should be fine. >> >> IIRC, --available-as isan option to import. >> >> I was thinking about the manual "cobbler distro add" case, where you >> might not even have a "tree" parameter at all, and the files might >> live on NFS somewhere. >> >> I'd probably attempt to make sure the path *looked* like a cobbler >> path, and if not, maybe raise an error or something. >> >> Maybe this is just the way I percieved it, but I basically view import >> as a shortcut path around distro add/profile add/etc, not the path you >> always have to go down. >> >> Anyway, some way to yell at you if you're doing it wrong seemed to be >> my point. >> >> if distro.kernel.find("ks_mirror") != -1: >> raise Exception("...") >> >> or something like that >> >> >> --Michael >> _______________________________________________ >> cobbler mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler >> > _______________________________________________ > cobbler mailing list > [email protected] > https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler > _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list [email protected] https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
