Deploying Ubuntu with Cobbler

Posted by Joe Topjian on August 9, 2010 under Administration | 8 Comments to Read

Introduction

In my previous article, I described the basics of Cobbler and how to get a simple installation up and running and distributing Linux.

While I was able to get simple RedHat-based distributions installed easily, I had some problems with Ubuntu. Although it was easy enough to configure Cobbler to distribute Ubuntu via PXE, I wanted it to utilize a kickstart file to automate responses. I had been doing this for quite some time without Cobbler, so I knew it had to be an issue internal to Cobbler.

After a few hours of troubleshooting and testing, I was able to get it working.

Table of Contents

• The Solution
  • Breed: ubuntu
  • Breed: redhat
• Configuration Files
• Conclusion

The Solution

note: This solution has only been tested with Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS.

The first thing I noticed was that the kernel options that are passed to the target system are significantly different when marking a distribution as a breed of “ubuntu” rather than “redhat”:

Breed: ubuntu

append initrd=/images/10.04-LTS-x86_64/initrd.gz  locale=  text  auto url=http://192.168.255.3/cblr/svc/op/ks/profile/Ubuntu-10.04-LTS-x64 hostname=Ubuntu-10.04-LTS-x64 domain=local.lan suite=jaunty

Breed: redhat

append initrd=/images/10.04-LTS-x86_64/initrd.gz ksdevice=bootif lang=  kssendmac text  ks=http://192.168.255.3/cblr/svc/op/ks/profile/Ubuntu-10.04-LTS-x64

It is my guess that the url option is supposed to tell the Debian/Ubuntu installer to download a preseed file at the given location and utilize that file for the installation. However, the installation simply ignored that file and never used any settings from it. An odd note is that when configured to download a kickstart file rather than a preseed file, the install gave an error. So it was obviously reading the file but choosing to ignore it.

With the Breed set to RedHat, a proper ks option is given and the Debian/Ubuntu installer correctly downloads the file and utilizes it.

Configuration Files

The next problem was to account for changes between a standard RedHat install and a Debian/Ubuntu install. Rather than detail those changes, I will simply attach the three files I came up with:

• /var/lib/cobbler/kickstarts/ubuntu.ks
• /var/lib/cobbler/snippets/pre_install_ubuntu_network_config
• /var/lib/cobbler/snippets/ubuntu_network_config

Conclusion

Although lacking in some details, the point of this article was to quickly detail how to configure Cobbler to be able to distribute an Ubuntu Server install that is able to utilize a kickstart / answer file. The network configuration snippets I created are not as thorough as the standard network snippets that are packaged with Cobbler, but they will successfully configure a system for a given static IP.