Installing & Configuring Cobbler

Cobbler performs bare metal provisioning and initial installation of Linux on OpenStack nodes. Luckily, you already have a Puppet Master installed and Fuel includes instructions for installing Cobbler, so you can install Cobbler using Puppet in a few seconds, rather than doing it manually.

Installing Fuel

Installing Fuel is a simple matter of copying the complete Fuel package to fuel-pm and unpacking it in the proper location in order to supply Fuel manifests to Puppet:

tar -xzf <fuel-archive-name>.tar.gz
cd <fuel-archive-name>
cp -Rf deployment/puppet/* /etc/puppet/modules/
service puppetmaster restart

From here, using Fuel is a matter of making sure it has the appropriate site.pp file from the Fuel distribution.

Using Puppet to install Cobbler

On fuel-pm, copy the contents of :

<FUEL_DIR>/deployment/puppet/cobbler/examples/site.pp

into your existing :

/etc/puppet/manifests/site.pp

file. The file has its own documentation, so it's a good idea to look through it to get a feel for the big picture and understand what's going on. The general idea is that this file sets certain parameters such as networking information, then defines the OS distributions Cobbler will serve so they can be imported into Cobbler as it's installed.

Lets take a look at some of the major points, and highlight where you will need to make changes:

...
# [server] IP address that will be used as address of cobbler server.
# It is needed to download kickstart files, call cobbler API and
# so on. Required.
$server = '10.0.0.100'

This, remember, is the fuel-pm server, which is acting as both the Puppet Master and Cobbler servers. :

# Interface for cobbler instances
$dhcp_interface = 'eth1'

The Cobbler instance needs to provide DHCP to each of the new nodes, so you will need to specify which interface will handle that. :

$dhcp_start_address = '10.0.0.201'
$dhcp_end_address = '10.0.0.254'

Change the $dhcp_start_address and $dhcp_end_address to match the network allocations you made earlier. The important thing is to make sure there are no conflicts with the static IPs you are allocating. :

$dhcp_netmask = '255.255.255.0'
$dhcp_gateway = '10.0.0.100'
$domain_name = 'your-domain-name.com'

Change the $domain_name to your own domain name. :

$name_server = '10.0.0.100'
$next_server = '10.0.0.100'
$cobbler_user = 'cobbler'
$cobbler_password = 'cobbler'
$pxetimeout = '0'

# Predefined mirror type to use: custom or default (should be removed soon)
$mirror_type = 'default'

Change the $mirror_type to be default so Fuel knows to request resources from Internet sources rather than having to set up your own internal repositories.

The next step is to define the node itself, and the distributions it will serve. :

...
type => $mirror_type,
}

node fuel-pm{

    class {'cobbler::nat': nat_range => $nat_range}
...

The file assumes that you're installing Cobbler on a separate machine. Since you're installing it on fuel-pm, change the node name here.

Next, you will need to uncomment the required OS distributions so that they can be downloaded and imported into Cobbler during Cobbler installation.

In this example we'll focus on CentOs, so uncomment these lines and change the location of ISO image files to either a local mirror or the fastest available Internet mirror for CentOS6.3x86_64minimal.iso:

...
# CentOS distribution
# Uncomment the following section if you want CentOS image to be downloaded and imported into Cobbler
# Replace "http://address/of" with valid hostname and path to the mirror where the image is stored

Class[cobbler::distro::centos63_x86_64] ->
Class[cobbler::profile::centos63_x86_64]

class { cobbler::distro::centos63_x86_64:
    http_iso => "http://address/of/CentOS-6.3-x86_64-minimal.iso",
    ks_url => "cobbler",
    require => Class[cobbler],
}

class { cobbler::profile::centos63_x86_64: }

# Ubuntu distribution
# Uncomment the following section if you want Ubuntu image to be downloaded and imported into Cobbler
# Replace "http://address/of" with valid hostname and path to the mirror where the image is stored
...

If you want Cobbler to serve Ubuntu or RedHat distributions in addition to CentOS, perform the same actions for those sections.

With those changes in place, Puppet knows that Cobbler must be installed on the fuel-pm machine, and will also add the right distro and profile. The CentOS image will be downloaded from the mirror and imported into Cobbler as well.

Note that while we've set up the network so that external resources are accessed through the 10.0.1.0/24 network, this configuration includes Puppet commands to configure forwarding on the Cobbler node to make external resources available via the 10.0.0.0/24 network, which is used during the installation process (see enable_nat_all and enable_nat_filter).

Finally, run the puppet agent to actually install Cobbler on fuel-pm:

puppet agent --test

Testing cobbler

You can check that Cobbler is installed successfully by opening the following URL from your host machine:

http://fuel-pm/cobbler_web/ (u: cobbler, p: cobbler)

If fuel-pm doesnt resolve on your host machine, you can access the Cobbler dashboard from:

http://10.0.0.100/cobbler_web

At this point you should have a fully working instance of Cobbler, fully configured and capable of installing the chosen OS (CentOS 6.3, RHEL 6.3, or Ubuntu 12.04) on the target OpenStack nodes.

5.7 KiB Raw Blame History

Installing & Configuring Cobbler

Installing Fuel

Using Puppet to install Cobbler

Testing cobbler

5.7 KiB

Raw Blame History