Cobbler usage

Warning

If you are not familiar with the Cobbler terminology, we strongly advise you to read the glossary :)

General usage

When you create a new “system”, Cobbler makes the following operations:

  • Reads the profile used by the system to create the installation ISO. The distribution (distro) is defined in the profile.
  • Generates the kickstart. The kickstart template is defined in the profile. The template is instantiate with the “profile” and the “system” informations.
  • The kickstart template may refer to several snippets.

How to view/modify a profile?

  1. Go to Cobbler

  2. Open the “profiles” view:

    _images/cobbler_profiles_view.png

  3. Choose a profile:

  4. Edit the profile:

The “virtualization” tab allows to set hardware resources:

_images/cobbler_profiles_virtualization.png

It may be used with Koan <http://cobbler.github.io/manuals/2.6.0/6/3_-_Installing-virtual-guests.html>_ to deploy virtual machine.

How to view/modify the kickstart?

  1. Go to Cobbler

  2. Open the “Kickstart Templates” view:

    _images/cobbler_kickstarts_view.png

  3. Choose the kickstart

  4. Edit the kickstart:

    _images/cobbler_kickstarts_edit.png

How to view/modify a snippet?

  1. Go to Cobbler

  2. Open the “Snippets” view:

    _images/cobbler_snippets_view.png

  3. Choose a snippet partitioning.conf

  4. Edit the snippet:

    _images/cobbler_snippets_edit.png

Glossary

distro
According to the Cobbler terminology, a “distro” is the configuration of an operating system. Ex: RHEL 6.5, Centos 7.2
kickstart
A file containing the answers to all the questions that would normally be asked during a typical OS installation (RHEL Linux type). Kickstart provides a way for users to automate any OS installation.
profile
A profile contains all configurations of the infrastructure and the platform (distro, CPU, RAM, Disk...). It’s like a model/template that can be refered by a system.
snippet
Snippets are a way of reusing common blocks of code between kickstarts. Its may be seen as function/macro. A snippet is saved in a separate file.
system
According the Cobbler terminology, a “system” contains the configuration of a particular machine. In other terms, it is an instance of a profile. For example, it contains specific network informations of a machine (IP, gateway, hostname...)