April 1st, 2009 Cobbler Provisioning Made Easy Jasper Capel

A little about Jasper Capel Technical Consultant for an open source consulting firm (Stone-IT, NL) Infrastructure specialist RHCE Active contributor to the Cobbler project Adding new features Fixing bugs IRC Chat Mailing list

The horrible past Manual installs at the console with a CD/DVD Prone to errors Each system is configured differently Not repeatable Takes a lot of time

What you have today Kickstart based installs with physical or network media, or image based deployments Manual repo management No automated control

Why should I use Cobbler API – Automation Multi-site replication and scalability Network and power management – Full installation automation and documentation Integrated configuration management Hardware independent deployment Supports both physical and virtual deployments Deployed hosts are fully up-to-date

Installing Cobbler on your server Install the RPM Run `cobbler check` Do what Cobbler tells you to do You are ready to install!

Importing a distro One command to import any distro into cobbler `cobbler import –name=Fedora-10 --path=/mnt`

Cobbler's structure Object based  Distribution Profile (one or more)  System  Repository  Image

Structure (cont.) - Distributions Usually created with “cobbler import” Kernel + Initrd pair Points to an installation tree

Structure (cont.) - Profiles “Container” object Child to distribution or other profile Parent to profiles and/or systems Defines path to kickstart and other information that may be shared between multiple systems Property inheritance

Structure (cont.) - Systems “Leaf” object Child to a profile Represents an actual system that can be deployed Contains networking information Inherited values can be overwritten

Structure (cont.) - Repositories Defines a package repository Repositories can be assigned to profiles / systems Point to a remote repository or have Cobbler mirror it locally

Structure (cont.) - Images Bootable images, not system images Boot into another imaging system from Cobbler Have systems boot into a firmware update disk or memtest

Structure chart

Kickstart templating YUM repo additions/replacement Snippets Templating FUNC Puppet

Creating a kickstart We want a desktop installation Defaults are fine, but we need additional packages Let's also create a default user

Adding a profile Profile is a container object Common properties can be defined for groups of systems `cobbler profile add –name=Fedora-desktop -- kickstart=/var/lib/cobbler/kickstarts/desktop.ks -- distro=Fedora-10-i386`

Adding a system A system must be attached to a profile Profile properties can be over written per system `cobbler system add –name=hplaptop -- profile=Fedora-desktop`

In the background (magic happens) DHCPD Bind (Dnsmasq) TFTPD

In the background - DHCPD Template based configuration Edit the template in /etc/cobbler/dhcpd.template Cobbler adds the systems and restarts the daemon as required

In the background - Bind Template based configuration Edit the template in /etc/cobbler/named.template Configure the zones Cobbler should manage in /etc/cobbler/settings

In the background - TFTPD Cobbler manages entries in /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg Copies BLOBs required for netbooting Templates are stored in /etc/cobbler/pxe/

Installing a system There are options Pre-define the system in cobbler...or don't Network boot CD boot

How the install system works Kernel and initial ram disk loaded over TFTP Initial bootstrap environment pulls down the installer from the mirror Installer gets the kickstart file and packages from the cobbler mirror

Feature overview Distributions: CentOS, Debian, Fedora, RHEL, SuSE, Ubuntu DNS and DHCP management Power management Lightweight built-in configuration management Support for external configuration management (like Puppet)

Feature overview (cont.) Python API XMLRPC API Authentication, Authorization, ACLs Replication CLI and web interface Templating (Cheetah) Lots more!

The system is installed! This is where Cobbler has finished Extra YUM repos used during the install put in place Network booting turned off automatically Puppet/FUNC can now configure the server with the services you require

KOAN Reinstall your running hardware with one command `koan –replace-self` Install virtual systems from your existing profiles `koan`

Architecture

How to get involved Get Cobbler packaged for your favourite distribution Submit patches (for example: support for your favourite OS or distribution) Join the mailing list and share your ideas Join IRC (irc.freenode.net, #cobbler)

Thank you

Questions?