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List:       cobbler
Subject:    Ideas for automating desktop installs?
From:       mdehaan () redhat ! com (Michael DeHaan)
Date:       2009-04-30 17:22:43
Message-ID: 49F9DE63.4020608 () redhat ! com
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Gino LV. Ledesma wrote:
> Hi, all
>
> I'm curious to know what other users have done for automating desktop
> installs. I've been reading the wiki and got a number of ideas using
> snippets. What I'm trying to do is do "self-installs", where a user
> can provision his or her own desktop with customizations for that
> user. It would be something like:
>
> 1. User PXE boots machine
> 2. User selects a profile
> 3. ???
> 4. Machine gets provisioned according to profile
> 5. Machine is ready for use with user's custom settings
>
> The constraint here is that I'd like to move away from creating system
> profiles prior to the install (which would normally require getting
> the MAC address and registering it with cobbler). 

We call these "system records" not "profiles", as we already have a 
"profiles" and saying "profile profiles" is weird.

>  What I'd like to
> tell cobbler (step 3) is that I'm provisioning this machine for a
> specific user -- perhaps by passing something onto the kernel command
> line as a parameter, and then having the post-install section do the
> customization based on that. For example, I could pass in
> username=$username and then a script/trigger could fire off and lookup
> a DB for that user, and then create the
> accounts/profiles/apps/configs/etc automatically.
>   

What many folks do is create a web interface that allows the user to 
answer specific questions, and then save those answers
as template varariables in the system objects which are used when 
evaluating the kickstart template.

If you want to do this via PXE you must create system records.
> I'm constrained to working with Windows managing DHCP, so I'm trying
> to pass the hostname onto the kickstart parameters somehow so I can
> get it register itself and update DDNS. As you can tell from the
> above, we're trying to reuse a single "generic" profile (which is my
> baseline) and simply customizing the install for a specific user (i.e.
> by adding that user's account) without creating.
>   

Per MAC pxe works here.
> So my questions are:
>
> 1. Is supplying this last information via kernel command line the best option?
>   

Not really :)

> 2. Can we somehow get a ksmeta variable set at profile-selection time
> outside of cobbler (e.g. in the boot selection menu)? (I doubt it)
>   

No.
> 3. Short of implementing integration with LDAP/Kerberos/Active
> Directory for authentication and using roaming user directories, are
> there any recommendations for "user provisioning" via cobbler? My last
> recourse is to have the account provisioning be done as a first-boot
> option.
>   

Possibly make the said webapp template manage Puppet and just make sure 
all systems
are subscribed. Or do what I said above about making system objects in 
the webapp.

> - gino
> _______________________________________________
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> cobbler at lists.fedorahosted.org
> https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
>   


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