I’ve used FAI & cobbler, but prefer the latter. I like the hybrid web GUI / CLI aspect of cobbler. My current workplace uses a PXE/kickstart server that works OK; I just don’t like having to KVM into the box just to force PXE boot & start the kickstart. It’s good that the systems won’t ever accidentally reinstall themselves that way, but there are other ways to prevent something like that from happening. (A proposed solution was to have a build-only VLAN, and to disable the NIC to that network as a final step of the provisioning process. It’s too big of a change to make to an already-running environment, but if you’re just setting one up I’de highly recommend it.)
Of course, I use the provisioning system just to set up partitions & filesystems, install a base OS (along with any packages common to my whole environment), and set up networking. After that, all control gets handed over to configuration management. -Brad P.S. It looks from the documentation that FAI now supports other OSes than Debian derivatives, but I haven’t tested it. In addition, for a long time Cobbler only supported RHEL derivatives (I’ve used it for CentOS), but colleagues have reported it working nicely with Debian lately as well. On Feb 17, 2014, at 9:16 AM, Mark Eisenblaetter <mark.eisenblaet...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > i'am working with FAI http://fai-project.org/ for some time now. > only cavehead i would use it only in a debian/ubuntu environment. > > mark > > > On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 7:45 PM, Matt Lawrence <m...@technoronin.com> wrote: > On Sun, 16 Feb 2014, Tom Limoncelli wrote: > > Does anyone have direct experience with Crowbar, Cobbler or other "bare > metal" provisioning systems? I'd be interesting in hearing your opinion. > > I've worked with crowbar some. Neat idea, but the implemtation leaves a bit > to be desired. There weren't any operations people involved in the design, > so it wants to do things like own your entire network. It's also a bit of a > black box instead of being a suite of tools that a sysadmin could put to use. > > -- Matt > It's not what I know that counts. > It's what I can remember in time to use. > > _______________________________________________ > Tech mailing list > Tech@lists.lopsa.org > https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ > > _______________________________________________ > Tech mailing list > Tech@lists.lopsa.org > https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ -- Brad Beyenhof . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . http://augmentedfourth.com Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously. ~ G.K. Chesterton, author (1874-1936) _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
