[et-mgmt-tools] Summary of things new in Cobbler 0.9/1.0

[Al Tobey]

On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 3:35 PM, Michael DeHaan <mdehaan at redhat.com> wrote:
>  Of possible interest to several folks:   I had to (temporarily) remove the
> "--autonet" code in koan today (this is a feature intended to ease usage of
> --replace-self in DHCP-less environments), because of errors it was raising
> in Python 2.3 regarding some bit shifting and so forth.  As I wasn't too
> familiar with the code and I don't have sufficient cycles to test it, it's
> out for now, but obviously we don't want to keep it that way if people need
> it.    I will accept patches to get it cleaned up and added back -- though
> I'm not sure it worked on EL4 in the past.   For patches, ideally it would
> not rely on direct parsing of commands and could get moved out to another
> file.    Koan is getting big enough now to use some cleanup in general so
> I'll try to be doing some of that.

That's too bad ... I was looking forward to not having to maintain a
local version of koan any more.   I'm not sure if it worked on EL4
since I mainly use koan -A for VM installs which run EL5 on dom0.

My only request at this point is that either --ip, --netmask, and
--gateway get added for setting network configuration on the kernel
command line, or better yet a more generic option gets added,
something like --cmdline "ip=x.x.x.x netmask=x.x.x.x gateway=x.x.x.x".
  That'd make it trivial to have a site-specific shell wrapper that
sets up custom kernel command line arguments and solves a few other
occasional problems (like pci=nommconf) in one fell swoop.   Other
neat stuff power users do could start working too.    For example,
koan --replace-self --cmdline "ksdevice=$macaddr" (handy for
multi-homed Dell 1950's where you never know which interface will end
up as eth0).

I don't really have time to write the patch, or it'd be attached ;)
It's a pretty simple modification though.

-Al