Installing Cobbler
Introduction
This post will show you step by step installation of Cobbler, please comment if you think anything’s is missing as you know nothing is perfect, so my blog
This topic focus on CentOS/RHEL/Fedora, if everything goes well here you should be able to build client servers without any manual work using PXE boot.
Server setup.
For the cobbler server basic requirement is you need two NIC cards if you want to use it for DHCP as well.
Why do i need two NIC cards because it allow client servers to initially boot up in the private network where Cobbler will handle the installation. Since Cobbler utilizes DHCP and TFTP, making these services listen on a Private network will ensure that they don’t interfere with any other DHCP or TFTP server on the Public network. Once the installation has finished, the client can be moved to the Public network.
Installation media
You can use any media you want. You can burn iso to DVD of CentOS 5 or 6 or Fedora.
Network selection.
For the Network Configuration, I renamed System eth0 and System eth1 to Public andPrivate respectively. I configured each NIC with static information and made sure to check theConnect Automatically checkbox for each — otherwise NetworkManager will not bring the NICs up.
Package Selection
For this section either you can rely on kickstart file which will have all packages listed in a tab called %packages or you can have minimal install like “Server”.
Post-Installation Steps.
Disable the Firewall
It’s possible to have the firewall running — you just need to ensure that the proper ports are opened. For simplicity, and since this server is in a private network, I chose to have the firewall turned off.
You can disable the firewall by doing: 1 | $ system-config-firewall-tui | and unselecting “Enabled”
Disable SELinux
I tried to have Cobbler run properly with SELinux, but in