Hi, all I'm curious to know what other users have done for automating desktop installs. I've been reading the wiki and got a number of ideas using snippets. What I'm trying to do is do "self-installs", where a user can provision his or her own desktop with customizations for that user. It would be something like:
1. User PXE boots machine 2. User selects a profile 3. ??? 4. Machine gets provisioned according to profile 5. Machine is ready for use with user's custom settings The constraint here is that I'd like to move away from creating system profiles prior to the install (which would normally require getting the MAC address and registering it with cobbler). What I'd like to tell cobbler (step 3) is that I'm provisioning this machine for a specific user -- perhaps by passing something onto the kernel command line as a parameter, and then having the post-install section do the customization based on that. For example, I could pass in username=$username and then a script/trigger could fire off and lookup a DB for that user, and then create the accounts/profiles/apps/configs/etc automatically. I'm constrained to working with Windows managing DHCP, so I'm trying to pass the hostname onto the kickstart parameters somehow so I can get it register itself and update DDNS. As you can tell from the above, we're trying to reuse a single "generic" profile (which is my baseline) and simply customizing the install for a specific user (i.e. by adding that user's account) without creating. So my questions are: 1. Is supplying this last information via kernel command line the best option? 2. Can we somehow get a ksmeta variable set at profile-selection time outside of cobbler (e.g. in the boot selection menu)? (I doubt it) 3. Short of implementing integration with LDAP/Kerberos/Active Directory for authentication and using roaming user directories, are there any recommendations for "user provisioning" via cobbler? My last recourse is to have the account provisioning be done as a first-boot option. - gino _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list [email protected] https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
