> > On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 3:05 AM, William of BHE <[email protected]> wrote: > >> You could try Cobbler. >> > > [ Various other manually built tools skipped. ] >
Examining cobbler: My early impressions are mixed. Reasonable GUI, some good concepts, but it's certainly not a polished tool. It suffers from classic feature bloat, at the expense of ease of use, and it's unusably broken out of the box due to mishandling of the timezone. It should read "America/New_York", not "America/NewYork", which was allegedly fixed upstream but hasn't been. *I* know enough to realize that it's rsync mirror tool is not suitable for normal yum installation and will boobytrap international KDE users because of the undocumented exclude list at /etc/cobbler/rsync.exclude. And I know enough to realize that if the source repository is on the same local filesystem, you can use "cp -alf" to replicate the old repository with hardlinks and save one hell of a lot of disk space. I also know enough to realize that the "rsync" command should consider using "--delete" or "--delete-excluded" when being re-run on top of an extant filesystem. And I'm sorry, but you really need to edit the settings file *before* running "cobbler check". The correct password for such a core service capable of mucking up your entire DHCP/PXE environment is not "cobbler", it should be *locked* until you go set that password. The permissions for the documentation in EPEL and Fedora 16's releases are mucked up. The apache user should *not* own the docs in /usr/share/doc/cobbler-web-*, That's an easy fix. The Pythion *.pyo files should not be standard files in the RPM, they should be "ghost" files. That's a common python RPM mistake, and again, an easy fix. Building the SRPM has spurious errors about duplicate files. You don't need to include a directory *and* its sub directories separately. Again, an easy mistake to fix. So again, overall, it's not a polished tool. A bit too much for my limited needs: I just wanted a PXE configuraton builder. I wonder why our favorite upstream vendor left it out of the packages?
