Bogdan Costescu wrote: > On Tue, 24 Mar 2009, Michael DeHaan wrote: > > >> 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. >> > > Things might be a little confuse, yes - is there a doc that makes this > distinction clear ? For me, after trying to use "cobbler import" and > failed due to missing .discinfo, it became clear that I have to use > "cobbler repo add" and stopped reading and thinking about imports. > >
Pretty much the best sources of documentation are the manpage and the Wiki (fedorahosted.org/cobbler). Import accepts DVDs and rsync mirrors -- I'd be curious as to where you got the discinfo error, but since you were using --available-as (I think) in a way different from the manpage that would probably explain it. >> All you have do to is set the "tree" variable appropriately >> > > Which variable is this ? None of the entities that I have defined > right now (distro, profile, system) have it. Is it repo specific ? > If you do an import of a DVD, for instance, and then do "cobbler distro report" you will see that there is a "--ksmeta" templating variable assigned called "tree" that points to the install source that corresponds to the variable $tree in files like /var/lib/cobbler/kickstarts/sample.ks. This tells the kickstart where the install source is. > >> 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. >> > > That is quite contrary to my intention: I want to keep the mirror as a > separate NFS server to be able to make installations independent of > the state of the cobbler server - using PXE or CDs - not as automated > as a cobbler install but good as a safety measure. > Yeah, in your case running import with --available-as would be perfectly fine, just make sure you use the same syntax as detailed in the man page. Keep in mind this is for install trees, not repos (things like updates or add-on content) > >> 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. >> > > Indeed, and I hinted at that when saying that I can achieve these > goals with some kickstart templates and snippets; still I would mount > it from the NFS server and not from the cobbler server. But I was > hoping that cobbler would do that for me... > Yes, it doesn't do that. If we teach repo add about such sources we also have to manipulate the system so that the NFS mount point is there when the nodes boot up. Basically this would require an additional parameter on repo add. That looks (hypotethically) like: "cobbler repo add --name=foo --mirror=file:///foo --systems-mount-as=nfs://bar" And then the yum_config_stanza part in cobbler has to do extra magic to configure installed hosts to auto-mount that location. (install trees we already have covered) > >> Ultimately Cobbler is about providing useful shortcuts for 80-90% of >> the use cases, it can't do everything for everyone >> > > Yes, I perfectly understood that while reading about it. However, > there were several instances in the documentation talking about usage > of repos placed on filers (probably NFS exported ISO images and not > real repos) which lead me to believe that what I was after is actually > working. That's not to say that I will give up now on cobbler - the > templating+snippets, the work done on network configuration and the > support for non-Red Hat distributions are valuable things that I would > like to use. And maybe you can be convinced to add support for NFS > exported repos some time in the future... > Sounds good, if the syntax can be kept simple, I'm all for it. _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list [email protected] https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
