----- Michael DeHaan <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Well and good, but now imagine a tornado comes and wipes all three away. > > Now you need to reconstitute your network, and you need to start with your > > Cobbler server, because you're about to kickstart a whole bunch of > > machines. You have to install the OS manually on that server, but then > > installing and configuring Cobbler the way you run it at your site is an > > item of "config setup," which you want Puppet to know about and do. > > Cobbler can help you control your DHCP and DNS and get all of those machines > and hostnames back, so it's a lot more concerned with low level datacenter > bits. I would want those services running first, before configuration > management. I would use Cobbler to install the OS that the config box runs > on, just like I'd use it to install the OS that my package mirroring comes > from. Cobbler probably manages the mirror of the puppet repo itself, in > many cases. This is not hard to back up. > > I would use cobbler replicate for disaster recovery purposes or include > /var/lib/cobbler and /etc/cobbler for backup purposes to quickly get your > config back. Nightly backups should be sufficient, or you could do the git > thing. > >
I would like to add my voice to the opinion that managing Cobbler with Puppet is a bass-ackwards way of approaching the problem. I started from this URL: <http://consultancy.edvoncken.net/index.php/HOWTO_Set_up_a_Subversion_repository_for_provisioning> I set up both Cobbler and Puppet in Subversion and using that, I could stand up the framework for a duplicate Cobbler server in less than an hour. The time consuming part then would be (downloading if necessary and) importing all the install iso's and creation of any local repositories and local repository mirrors. This replication could be shortened by having good backups of not only /var/lib/cobbler and /etc/cobbler but of any local distributions and repositories. All of the distro, profile, repo, and system definitions in Cobbler "live" in /var/lib/cobbler/config as JSON files. Go look. Once a Cobbler Server is set up, the only changes, as I see the setup, is adding new systems. It seems to me that the distros, profiles, and repos change infrequently compared to the systems. Also, to document how I set up the Cobbler server, I did all of my initial setup steps on the command line instead of through the web interface and saved all of my commands. Using that list of command lines, I could build a duplicate server from scratch almost as quickly as using the Subversion copy. Trying to use Puppet to manage Cobbler seems to me to be one of those "Killing a house fly with a howitzer" things. “Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.” Bill Waterson (Calvin & Hobbes) _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list [email protected] https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
