Savannah W-ITS

I posted previously about the Open Source projects Cobbler (provisioning) and Zenoss (monitoring.)  Spacewalk is a Redhat solution that provides:

Inventory your systems (hardware and software information)
Install and update software on your systems
Collect and distribute your custom software packages into manageable groups
Provision (kickstart) your systems
Manage and deploy configuration files to your systems
[...]

This seems to be a topic of interest so here is a bit more information about using Cobbler to provision Linux systems under VirtualBox. The steps are fairly simple and allow you to use virtual NICS to reach your Cobbler server. To use this information you need: a) a system with an operating Cobbler install and b) Linux VMs configured within VirtualBox.

Hmm, remember the 3 B’s? (backup! backup! backup!)

During my exploration of Cobbler, Virtual Systems (Xen, Qemu, Virtual Box, others) and various Linux distrobutions I used my laptop which also contained a native XP install. Things went really well using Cobbler to setup various types of Kickstart files (full install, just a base install, web server install, etc.)

At some point I used the wrong option (in a kickstart file) for disk

Cobbler – a provisioning system for Linux or other OS builds

Virtual Box – A virtual machine (VM) management suite (packaged by Sun)

Just a few years ago the hardware in computer systems (PCs and servers) tended to contain quite a number of proprietary components which required special treatment/drivers/setup-configuration to create a functional and useful system.  The build process tended to be time consuming and was typically customized based

Problem – I need a simple way to install/update/re-purpose/network boot/manage systems or servers on my network. Is it possible to create a simple infrastructure to provide this type of flexiblity?