Home / server / Questions / 42353
Accepted
Continuation
Asked: 2009-07-18 13:24:40 +0800 CST

How to set up Cobbler with Puppet or Cfengine?

  • 772

I've heard a lot about using Cobbler together with Puppet/Cfengine for rapid deployment & configuration.

Can you point me to some tutorials or share you experience of how you do it?

Would also love to hear about any other systems you use for rapid provisioning & deployment. Thanks.

deployment puppet configuration cfengine cobbler

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Here is a good blog entry on how to bootstrap puppet using cobbler. The author uses VirtualBox Virtual Machines, but you can easily adapt it to a physical server.

    http://number9.hellooperator.net/articles/2009/04/13/bootstrapping-puppet-from-cobbler

    Basically, you have a kickstarter server that runs puppetmasterd and cobbler. You customize a kickstart to install puppet and start it automatically. Once its all done with the kickstart puppet runs and takes over.

    It will take some time to fine tune everything to get it the way you want it, but with this set up you can create your own private LAN, create a profile for a particular server with cobbler, plug it in to the private LAN, boot and go watch a movie while your server is automatically built ;)

    • 3

  2. I'm running Cobbler with Puppet in a pure Red Hat / CentOS shop. It's working fine, although you have to work out scalability issues with Puppet if you have several hundred servers.

    We were reworking the Puppet-templates for Xen/virt-install quite a bit, but the support for physical server installation with the Cobbler templates that are included with Puppet works well with Red Hat.

    Unfortunately I do not have documentation that I can share.

    • 1

  3. You can also use FAI with xen-tools. It supposedly works well, but I'm still testing it out.

    • 0

  4. Well, cfengine 3 has a complete language built write-in, so modular is not a requirement. It's also very lightweight and small.

    • -1