Cobbler + KOAN

If you look back through my previous entries, you will see several mentions of Cobbler and Koan, which I have used for doing RHEL Kickstart installs. The past several weeks, I have been working towards migrating 70+ host definitions and associated distribution/repository information from an old Cobbler 2.8.3 install to a totally fresh install of Cobbler 3.3.6.  Rather than just copying configuration files over and letting Cobbler attempt migrating the data, since much of it was dated (in some cases dating back to my first Cobbler 0.4-ish install), I decided to export everything, go through each entry, and either verify the data, or in some cases, toss the definitions of old entries which are no longer needed. But first, I had to get both the new server and cobbler instance installed, and the data exported.

The new server, which is replacing many of the tasks a 20 year old Athlon 2500 machine with only 256MB of RAM, is far newer. I have assigned 2 cores and 8GB of RAM to the virtual machine, which is running the latest Rocky Linux 9.4 release (and is awaiting the 9.5 release). All this for running Cobbler, along with my associated DHCP and DNS servers, as well as OpenLDAP, for starters. Along the way, I did a manual but very minimal install of the OS, and wrote an Ansible role to do the additional provisioning (which I will be placing up on GitHub for folks to reference). And there were some rough spots with getting Cobbler to install using RPMs. First, there was the fact that a package which Cobbler depended upon being renamed and moving to a different repository. Then, there was the fact that while I could import the entire CD into cobbler, I could not import a mirror which was available on my NAS. These have or are resulting in changes fed back into the Cobbler project itself. And then, there were some tweaks to SELinux which probably really need to go back to the SELinux project, which were necessary for Cobbler to be able to manage the DNS service. But finally, that is up, my systems, distros and repositories into Cobbler (in part thanks to my cobbler extractor project), my DHCP and DNS switched over to the new server (with slave DNS servers working), my new Ansible install working, and my LDAP data migrated.  And now I start with Koan.

Because, as the maintainer admits, Koan is in need of some TLC, I intend on giving it some. There are thoughts that it might need some updates to work with the 3.3.x servers (it is still back at 3.0), and first indications are that this may be the case. But first, I needed to get one of my kickstart scripts updated for the RHEL 9 Anaconda code, which it directly accesses in the background to determine the disk partitioning automatically. And that took several hours yesterday, but now, I am trying to get Koan to properly size the disk for a test server I am trying to install. And that is where I am today... but at least it was firing up the virtual machine via virt-install, though it looks like it may not have been working with the right parameters.  But now the fun begins...

It will be so nice to finally be able to do kickstart installs with this combination again!