CentOS 6 Cobbler Server
Introduction This article will be a step-by-step guide of how to set up a Cobbler server on CentOS 6. Once the server is complete, you will be able to have CentOS 6 automatically installed onto client computers when they are PXE booted on a private network.
Cobbler, ESXi, CentOS, and VMWare Tools
Introduction This short article will detail a Cobbler snippet for automatically installing the ESXi VMWare Tools. Table of Contents Method VMWare Repo Cobbler Snippet Snippet Inclusion Conclusion Method This method was inspired by this blog post. It imports the VMWare RPM key and then creates a Yum repository to download the VMWare RPMs. I simply [...]
Caching RPMs with pkg-cacher
Introduction apt-cacher is an excellent proxy server for caching .deb packages. It integrates into apt so that when a package is requested, apt-cacher checks to see if there is a cached copy. If there is, it sends the cached copy. If there isn’t, it downloads the package from the Internet, caches it, and sends it [...]
Cobbler and SSH Keys
Introduction Utilizing SSH keys for server access, whether password-less or with a passphrase, is a staple of system administration and automation. However, configuring this type of access is usually done manually: an admin will manually log in to the server, manually create the /root/.ssh directory, and then manually paste the source server’s public SSH key [...]
Deploying Ubuntu with Cobbler
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 [...]
Cobbler
Introduction I recently discovered Cobbler, an server that assists in the automated deployment of Linux distributions. A normal installation infrastructure is composed of several components: DHCP, DNS, PXE, TFTP, and the actual install media. Cobbler glues all of these components together very nicely. In addition, it provides dynamic configuration support by the way of kickstart [...]