It's time to play the music.
It's time to light the lights.
It's time to announce the Cobbler on the mailing list tonight.

Or something.  I felt like some fanfare was required.

Cobbler 1.4's been a very special and looooong release.   The last 
stable release, 1.2 came out at the end of August (with update releases 
for 1.2 still coming out through October), and the development branch of 
Cobbler has been taking off since then.   We've kept it going because I 
didn't want to stop the energy.  It's been huge.   Not counting things 
applied to the 1.2.X branch, the changelog is almost 70 items long 
(http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/cobbler.git?p=cobbler;a=blob_plain;f=CHANGELOG;hb=1aae8e137ddf857e65027f492fbdff9a373fdd13).
  
The levels of involvement are at an all time high and the many features 
you'll see have been developed by an extremely large amount of people, 
which is definitely what I like to see -- Cobbler is definitely 
achieving it's aims of being an install tool all administrators and 
systems management developers can share, and that theme continues with 
this release more than ever.

So, what's new?

There's a lot of features, largely described here.  
https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/WhatsNewInThirteen.   If that's 
too much reading, what should you care about and use? 

-- Advanced networking setup.   If you're using --hostname before, be 
aware --dns-name does what the old hostname does.   Your configurations 
will be migrated automatically.
-- Integrated power management features so you can manage your power 
configurations directly from cobbler, and make reinstallation of power 
managed systems incredibly simple.
-- Much improved support for other distribtutions, such as Debian, which 
will continue to evolve in future releases. 
-- Support for ppc netbooting.   Koan will now also do --replace-self on 
ppc and s390
-- Rescue profiles are automatically created during import time, 
allowing them to be deployed over the network and used with "cobbler 
buildiso"
-- Virtual image cloning, and better options for managing things like 
memtest and assigning images to netboot to specific systems, images can 
also be edited in the webapp
-- Web application reorganization and many new fields, and a much 
improved editor for multiple network interfaces
-- Upgrades to reposync to support multiple retries and to be able to 
ignore failures on particular repos
-- Better integration with Puppet and also a new lightweight built-in 
configuration management system based on Cobbler templates.
-- Lots of bugfixes and minor improvements that are too numerous to name.
-- Easier registration and key management for Red Hat Satellite Server 
and RHN Hosted, for those using those applications
-- ... and a lot of other things

A huge thanks to everyone that helped with ideas, development, and 
testing of the 1.3.X branch and this release.  I've said it before, but 
I really mean it -- this release could not happen without all of you.   

RPMs have been pushed to Fedora 8, 9, 10 and rawhide, as well as EPEL-4 
and EPEL-5 (testing for now, stable when that rolls over).   You can 
also find source RPMs and tarballs at
http://people.fedoraproject.org/~mdehaan/files/cobbler/

Please report any problems you find as we will continue to do update 
releases to this stable branch as we work on the 1.5.X release.

For those interested in the development branch, it is once again active 
and repurposed for 1.5 (remember, we're using the odd=devel, even=stable 
numbering scheme) -- I will be looking at merging the backlog of patches 
today and Monday, and you'll be hearing more from me shortly about 
broader plans and some of the things I'd like to focus on for the future. 

Happy installing!

--Michael





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