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Ease Linux Deployments With Cobbler (enterprise networking planet)
Enterprise Networking Planet
reviews Cobbler.
"The kickstart tool set is widely supported by a number of Linux distributions including Red Hat and its derivatives and, more recently, Ubuntu. Previously there was not a commonly used system to manage this installation environment and most sysadmins relied on homebrew scripts. Cobbler is a new project from Red Hat that aims to provide turnkey support for provisioning kickstart installs and setting up the needed services to load your systems.
Cobbler supports new installations both physical and virtual and reinstalls of existing systems."
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Ease Linux Deployments With Cobbler (enterprise networking planet) Posted Sep 25, 2008 19:58 UTC (Thu) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link]
For those don't know, Ubuntu and any Debian based distributions support kickstart via something called kickseed. This work was sponsored by Canonical and was merged into debian-install soon afterwords.
Whoever says canonical never did anything is a bit off.
Ease Linux Deployments With Cobbler (enterprise networking planet) Posted Sep 25, 2008 21:45 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I'm not sure kickseed is the best example to hold up as a counterpunch to the challenge to Canonical of collaborating better with upstream. Since kickseed is a completely new implementation of an existing technology, and not an extension to an existing implementation. I'm not saying there isn't an element of truth in what you are saying. It's good to see a common technology being used across distributions, even if it means multiple implementations. But I don't think its fundamentally the best example to use to address the specific issues upstream developers have with Canonical and chart a new course for relations.
I think the dialogue between Cobbler upstream and Canonical employees from July onwards looks to be a much better example of the type of collaboration that I think upstream developers would generally like to see Canonical participate in more strongly. Cobbler is an existing codebase and Canonical employees and debian using community are working to extend the functionality of Cobbler as part of a dialogue with upstream developers.. and putting the code into the upstream codebase as part of that dialogue.
It looks like its going swimmingly for everyone and Cobbler will gain support for debian derived distributions. All of it happening without a quote from Shuttleworth finding its way into the press to heighten awareness of the issue before the work is completed.
When the work is completed to integrate debian support into Cobbler, I'll be in line to congratulate everyone for a job well done. Hopefully I won't be the first person. Hopefully Shuttleworth will take the opportunity to lift up that successful collaboration as an example of Canonical's commitment to directly worth with upstream projects. It's a good example and none of us should be afraid to point to it as a best practise approach moving forward.
Ease Linux Deployments With Cobbler (enterprise networking planet) Posted Sep 25, 2008 21:52 UTC (Thu) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link]
Using redhat's kickstart implementation would require anaconda which will never happen in debian (we both know that). kickseed is basicly a ks.cfg parser that uses debian-installer's "preseed" installation method. It is pretty cool the way they did it actually.
Very good point though jef.
Ease Linux Deployments With Cobbler (enterprise networking planet) Posted Sep 25, 2008 22:15 UTC (Thu) by skvidal (subscriber, #3094) [Link]
Progeny used anaconda to install debian a number of years ago.
Ease Linux Deployments With Cobbler (enterprise networking planet) Posted Sep 28, 2008 11:18 UTC (Sun) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link]
And why did Ian Murdock leave the company he founded (Progeny) again? Because it was a failure.
Ease Linux Deployments With Cobbler (enterprise networking planet) Posted Sep 25, 2008 22:11 UTC (Thu) by mdehaan (guest, #39369) [Link]
From what I've seen, most contributions to Cobbler so far in the Debian area have come from regular Debian and Ubuntu users, not Canonical employees, who cited they did not have time to contribute to (any?) upstream projects.
Canonical expressed interest originally but did not contribute to cobbler in terms of code, though I remain optimistic that they might in the future, especially in light of gregkh's advice to them (which I completely agree with). I also look forward to seeing more involvement from them in the kernel.
Let's not get too sidetracked by it also supporting kickseed, which was a no-op to implement, and did not require code changes. The Fedora / EL implementation still has more features and kickseeds are still not 100% compatible. Fedora/RHEL offer more features in kickstart, since preseed is just an adapter.
Cobbler also supports preseed directly, without going through the kickseed layer, which was contributed to Cobbler about a year ago by Debian users. This /might/ be a better choice. AutoYaST (SuSE) is supported through similar means, contributed by SuSE users, around the same time. Of course should Gentoo folks come along, they would be welcome to add themselves :)
Either way, it's ultimately just a templating system, so it deals with flatfiles simply and mostly it's just about supporting different kernel arguments and leaving the installer hard work up to the individual distros.
Maybe we'll see involvement from Canonical here but I have not yet seen code contributions from @canonical.com. Regardless though, it means more adoption, and we'll take the patches from whoever they come from.
Ease Linux Deployments With Cobbler (enterprise networking planet) Posted Sep 25, 2008 22:38 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Soren lists himself as a Canonical employee if you look on his Ubuntu wiki page. And I believe his signature at the end of his Cobbler posts indicate a Canonical employment as well.
If Soren hasn't been working with Javier offlist in the meantime since Soren's original interest that would be unfortunate.
I make no effort to try to judge if its anyone is on the clock when they are interacting with upstream projects.
-jef
Ease Linux Deployments With Cobbler (enterprise networking planet) Posted Sep 25, 2008 22:48 UTC (Thu) by mdehaan (guest, #39369) [Link]
I have not seen any patches from Soren, though I do recall talking with Soren a good bit on when we would see patches he was working on and not seeing them posted. It is not fair for me to single him or any one else out specifically, though I /did/ want to point out WRT other comments that all the good things that are happening in the cross-distro side are coming from the community as opposed to vendors. I'm totally fine with that as I am all for the community and cobbler owes /tons/ to them. I am not fine with credit being attributed to vendors. We've done a lot to make sure that other distributions can use our software because we believe the software benefits from wider adoption and a larger community -- see also libvirt which has been excellent in this, which is another Red Hat sponsored project. I would be interested in seeing more cooperation in the Linux ecosystem from Canonical, but there are more interesting stories to be told just in terms of Linux management in general, so let's not focus on that.
Ease Linux Deployments With Cobbler (enterprise networking planet) Posted Sep 25, 2008 23:26 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
How do we do a better job of tracking vendor support? That's the heart of the matter. We have people who wear multiple hats at the same time. When someone with a paying development gig walks into a project we don't really know if they are there burning volunteer hours or are there working on the clock for the man. How accurately can you really give credit to an employer when the employee mixes volunteer effort in with the paid hours under the same email address? I doubt it would be appropriate to give Red Hat all the credit for all the time you spend being my hero.
I don't think what people are looking for is Canonical to "sponsor" a lot of new upstream project initiatives. I think, primarily, the challenge is to see Canonical employees more active in pre-existing upstream development processes. Though if they all use Ubuntu email addresses, it becomes more difficult to see when that is happening. If Canonical's interest has waned completely in helping see Cobbler gain support for debian based systems that would be a significant missed opportunity for Canonical as a way to begin to rise to that challenge.
-jef
Ease Linux Deployments With Cobbler (enterprise networking planet) Posted Sep 26, 2008 3:48 UTC (Fri) by Burgundavia (guest, #25172) [Link]
(IANACanonical Employee) I rather suspect that Soren simply got squeezed for time with lots of other things that are involved in the day to day development of a distro.
Ease Linux Deployments With Cobbler (enterprise networking planet) Posted Sep 27, 2008 0:54 UTC (Sat) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]
Seems like a good way would be for Ubuntu (and Red Hat) employees to have matching commercial/volunteer e-mail addresses, and to declare their hat by using the appropriate e-mail address when committing.
Ease Linux Deployments With Cobbler (enterprise networking planet) Posted Sep 27, 2008 3:23 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
why do you care if they are on company time or not?
why should they bother maintaining seperate e-mail addresses and making sure they use the 'right' one at the 'right' time? that's just extra work for them.
if they want to, that's fine, but why should they be forced to?
Ease Linux Deployments With Cobbler (enterprise networking planet) Posted Oct 3, 2008 0:41 UTC (Fri) by dberkholz (subscriber, #23346) [Link] Of course should Gentoo folks come along, they would be welcome to add themselves :)I must admit this sounds mildly interesting, perhaps using quickstart.
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