Cobbler

[Lisa Kachold]

*Anyone playing with this at the Installfest?*

 *Cobbler is an install server; batteries are included..*

Cobbler is a Linux installation server that allows for rapid setup of
network installation environments. It glues together and automates many
associated Linux tasks so you do not have to hop between lots of various
commands and applications when rolling out new systems, and, in some cases,
changing existing ones.

With a simple series of commands, network installs can be configured for
PXE, reinstallations, media-based net-installs, and virtualized installs
(supporting Xen, qemu, KVM, and some variants of VMware). Cobbler uses a
helper program called 'koan' (which interacts with Cobbler) for
reinstallation and virtualization support.

Cobbler is a small and lightweight application (about 15k lines of Python
code). It tries to be extremely simple to use both for very small and very
large installations -- as well as easy to work on, extend, and hack. It
avoids being "enterprisey" (as in complicated) whenever possible, but is
highly useful in all sorts of enterprises by having a lot of advanced
features and doing small things to save a large amount of time in repeated
tasks.

Cobbler can also optionally help with managing DHCP, DNS, and yum package
mirroring infrastructure -- in this regard, it is a more generalized
automation app, rather than just dealing specifically with installations.
There is also a lightweight built-in configuration management system, as
well as support for integrating with configuration management systems like
Puppet. Cobbler has a command line interface, a web interface
(screenshot<https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/attachment/wiki/CobblerWebInterface/Screenshot.png>),
and also several API access options. That sounds like a lot, but it's really
pretty simple. New users may like to start with the web app after doing the
initial setup steps on the command line (cobbler check; cobbler import) as
it will give them a good idea of all of the features available. Advanced
features don't have to be understood all at once, they can be incorporated
over time as the need for them arises.
excerpt from:  https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/

http://terrarum.net/administration/centos-6-cobbler-server.html#server_environment
http://openskill.info/blog.php?ID=16
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-QpCYKrVew  (Video)

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