James G. Sack (jim) wrote: > Anybody had any exposure to this? > http://cobbler.et.redhat.com/
I actually wrote the web interface for Cobbler, so I'm a bit biased ;) It's a very nice tool that's getting better all the time. The lead developer is easily accessible on Freenode IRC in #cobbler. It's being used all over the place, even here in San Diego for various server farms. Personally, I have it set up to pretty much be able to install any of (CentOS|RHEL|Fedora|Redhat) (\d+\.?\d*) over PXE in just a few minutes. It works best with Redhat derivatives right now, but people have it working for SuSE, Debian, NetBSD, and even Windows. The jist of it is, it takes all of the fiddly bits about setting up and managing a PXE/kickstart/distribution/update system and ties it all up into a neat package. A lot of sysadmins, me included, have said about it: "I've been thinking about writing something like that for years but haven't had the time or motivation." The client companion, koan, has a neat ability to "replace-self" where it'll generate a custom initrd that boots straight into the OS installer for reinstalls/upgrades. There's also experimental support for generating livecd's for kickstart installations in the git tree. There's a nice tutorial by the author at: http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/08/10/cobbler-how-to-set-up-a-network-boot-server-in-10-minutes/ If you have any questions about it, let me know or jump on the IRC channel. -Al Tobey -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
