Bogdan Costescu wrote: > On Mon, 23 Mar 2009, Michael DeHaan wrote: > > >> The content /must/ be surfaced externally somehow even if you are >> not mirroring it, for installed machines to be able to access that >> content. >> > > Yes, as I tried to explain in a previous e-mail, it's all done through > NFS. For the moment, so without using cobbler, the installed machine > acts as a NFS client by having in /etc/fstab something like: > > mirrorserver:/mirrordir /mnt/upd nfs hard,intr,ro 0 0 > > (can also be done with "noauto" or via autofs to avoid the mount being > permanent) and in /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo something like: > > [base] > name=CentOS-$releasever - Base > baseurl=file:///mnt/upd/centos/$releasever/os/$basearch/ > > Installing/updating on hundreds of machines, like I do, needs to be as > efficient as possible - when using NFS to share the repos, yum doesn't > need to download the RPMs before installing them, it only checks them, > which is much faster and requires a lot less network traffic. > Furthermore, instead of reading the freshly downloaded RPM from a > local disk (/var/cache/yum) and writing it back to possibly the same > disk (if /var is not on a separate partition), it reads the RPM > directly from the network; when doing simultaneous installs/updates on > many clients, the RPMs are most likely cached in RAM on the NFS > server, so the whole process becomes limited by the network bandwidth > and the speed of rpm writing files to the local disk. > > The answers to my messages as well as browsing through the cobbler > list archives makes me wonder whether you are aware that yum is able > to work this way. > >
Yes, I'm aware it can install from file, I didn't quite make the connection you had a common NFS path for every system. Just for starters though, I think you may be confusing repos and install trees a little bit. "cobbler import" deals with install trees. "cobbler repo add" deals with updates and additional content. All you have do to is set the "tree" variable appropriately and reference the NFS url in your kickstart and cobbler is not stopping you from doing NFS installs. Use "cobbler distro add" and this all just works. Import is just, basically, a shortcut step. For the NFS parts, cobbler is not stopping you from doing what you want either, you'd just have to mirror the content onto the cobbler server and then make it available over NFS. Cobbler right now defaults to making that available via http, for a bit simpler and more predictable access. You could also make repo_mirror available over NFS for reads if you wanted, and then configure the yum.repos.d files on the hosts to do that. Ultimately Cobbler is about providing useful shortcuts for 80-90% of the use cases, it can't do everything for everyone, but is intended to get an install up and running simply, and allow folks to make configuration modifications and optimizations where they like. In this case, it looks like you would not want to have settings configured to use Cobbler's http:// share for post install, and you could just use NFS. That would work. However, the syntax of the cobbler import should not be confused with repos, and if you want to use a install tree via NFS, just "cobbler distro add" it and use the external nfs:// path of the file server in $tree. --Michael _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list [email protected] https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
