[Spacewalk-list] suse support ?

[Michael DeHaan]

Miroslav Suchy wrote:
> ----- "Jan-Frode Myklebust" <janfrode at tanso.net> wrote:
>
>   
>> From https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/wiki/HowToKickstartCobbler :
>>
>> "
>>    New features in 0.4 include
>> 		# Evolving support for Debian, SuSE, and Ubuntu (limited exposure in
>> Spacewalk)
>> "
>>     
>
> This page is about Cobbler. And Cobbler can kickstart this distribution. So you can probably kickstart this distribution, but you can not register them to Spacewalk.  
>
>   

Yeah, I find that Wiki page rather complicated to read -- it mixes what 
the user needs to do with what the user doesn't need to know about 
happening behind the scenes and would probably be better served by 
having some screenshots -- the actual GUIs aren't really complicated, 
nor does the user really need to know that deployment is cobbler powered.

Anyway, short answer, one can't kickstart SuSE, because SuSE doesn't use 
kickstart :)   SuSE uses AutoYast answer files.   Thankfully this works 
pretty much the same way.

You can add SuSE distributions to cobbler with:
    cobbler distro add --name=suse-x --initrd=/path/to/initrd 
--kernel=/path/to/kernel --breed=suse

Then when you specify a profile, the value you give for --kickstart is 
really an autoyast file (template)
    cobbler profile add --name=suse-x --kickstart=/path/to/autoyast.template

So you have to do this either at the command line level or using Cobbler 
Web (http://server.example.org/cobbler/web) -- you can log in with a 
spacewalk username/password for certain admin accounts.

AutoYaST files are XML, rather than being a domain specific 
language/script.   

I should add that some of the cobbler snippets and such that are useful 
for Fedora/RHEL/CentOS etc, don't really work for SuSE, so there is a 
bit less automation, but the basic infrastructure works for doing 
physical installs and upgrades.   Whether koan works on SuSE I'm not 
sure of -- but if folks are interested in extending that support, I'd be 
more than happy to have the help.   We also have similar support
for Debian -- that's actually a little better and further along.

Spacewalk should not see distributions/profiles/systems if the breed is 
not set to Red Hat -- if it does, or otherwise crashes, that would 
probably be a bug.

--Michael