An IT nomad's daily diary

Growth??

Article from ADMIN 06/2011

By Thorsten Scherf

This month, we show you how to map and install a large system landscape with Cobbler and Spacewalk – without a lot of effort.

I've just completed my first meeting with customers, and they look happy enough but not totally convinced. Maybe they're wondering whether I have bitten off more than I can chew. After all, I'm talking about several hundred machines. How am I going to install and configure all of these machines and install the software in such a short span of time?

Thanks to the Cobbler XMLRPC API [1], however, creating all of those system profiles in the Cobbler database shouldn't be that much of a problem. Through intensive talks with the customer, I can determine what kind of systems they have and how to configure them. And, all this easily can be handled with a matching structure and a sophisticated Kickstart profile on the Spacewalk server [2]. An article on this topic was published not so long ago in Admin magazine [3].

In other words, the many Cobbler system records are really the biggest problem. Just to jog your memory: Using system records, Cobbler can create an individual PXE configuration file for each system. With the snippets that I will be using later in the Kickstart profile, it is possible to customize a system at a very early stage. This setup applies to the operating system to be installed, the network configuration, and – thanks to arbitrary variables that I can define as kernel arguments in Cobbler – to any conceivable configuration setting.

A bit of foo script lets me use these variables for the installation and modify the system to reflect my needs. After creating a record for a system, I really only need to fire up the machines to trigger a fully automated PXE-based installation. The real task here is adding these entries to the Cobbler database. A typical example looks something like Listing

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