5.3. cobbler distro

This first step towards configuring what you want to install is to add a distribution record to Cobbler’s configuration.

If there is an rsync mirror, DVD, NFS, or filesystem tree available that you would rather import instead, skip down to the documentation about the import command. It’s really a lot easier to follow the import workflow – it only requires waiting for the mirror content to be copied and/or scanned. Imported mirrors also save time during install since they don’t have to hit external install sources.

If you want to be explicit with distribution definition, however, here’s how it works:

$ cobbler distro add --name=string --kernel=path --initrd=path [--kernel-options=string] [--kernel-options-post=string] [--autoinstall-meta=string] [--arch=i386|x86_64|ppc|ppc64|ppc64le|arm64] [--breed=redhat|debian|suse] [--template-files=string]

Name	Description
arch	Sets the architecture for the PXE bootloader and also controls how Koan’s --replace-self option will operate. The default setting (standard) will use pxelinux. x86 and x86_64 effectively do the same thing as standard. If you perform a cobbler import, the arch field will be auto-assigned.
autoinstall- meta	This is an advanced feature that sets automatic installation template variables to substitute, thus enabling those files to be treated as templates. Templates are powered using Cheetah and are described further along in this manpage as well as on the Cobbler Wiki. Example: --autoinstall-meta="foo=bar baz=3 asdf" See the section on “Kickstart Templating” for further information.
boot-files	TFTP Boot Files (Files copied into tftpboot beyond the kernel/initrd).
boot-loaders	Boot loader space delimited list (Network installation boot loaders). Valid options for list items are <<inherit>>, grub, pxe, ipxe.
breed	Controls how various physical and virtual parameters, including kernel arguments for automatic installation, are to be treated. Defaults to redhat, which is a suitable value for Fedora and CentOS as well. It means anything Red Hat based. There is limited experimental support for specifying “debian”, “ubuntu”, or “suse”, which treats the automatic installation template file as a preseed/autoyast file format and changes the kernel arguments appropriately. Support for other types of distributions is possible in the future. See the Wiki for the latest information about support for these distributions. The file used for the answer file, regardless of the breed setting, is the value used for --autoinstall when creating the profile.
comment	Simple attach a description (Free form text) to your distro.
fetchable-files	Fetchable Files (Templates for tftp or wget/curl)
initrd	An absolute filesystem path to a initrd image.
kernel	An absolute filesystem path to a kernel image.
kernel-options	Sets kernel command-line arguments that the distro, and profiles/systems depending on it, will use. To remove a kernel argument that may be added by a higher Cobbler object (or in the global settings), you can prefix it with a !. Example: --kernel-options="foo=bar baz=3 asdf !gulp" This example passes the arguments foo=bar baz=3 asdf but will make sure gulp is not passed even if it was requested at a level higher up in the Cobbler configuration.
kernel-options- post	This is just like --kernel-options, though it governs kernel options on the installed OS, as opposed to kernel options fed to the installer. The syntax is exactly the same. This requires some special snippets to be found in your automatic installation template in order for this to work. Automatic installation templating is described later on in this document. Example: noapic
mgmt-classes	Management Classes (Management classes for external config management).
name	A string identifying the distribution, this should be something like rhel6.
os-version	Generally this field can be ignored. It is intended to alter some hardware setup for virtualized instances when provisioning guests with Koan. The valid options for --os-version vary depending on what is specified for --breed. If you specify an invalid option, the error message will contain a list of valid OS versions that can be used. If you don’t know the OS version or it does not appear in the list, omitting this argument or using other should be perfectly fine. If you don’t encounter any problems with virtualized instances, this option can be safely ignored.
owners	Users with small sites and a limited number of admins can probably ignore this option. All Cobbler objects (distros, profiles, systems, and repos) can take a –owners parameter to specify what Cobbler users can edit particular objects.This only applies to the Cobbler WebUI and XML-RPC interface, not the “cobbler” command line tool run from the shell. Furthermore, this is only respected by the authorization.ownership module which must be enabled in the settings. The value for --owners is a space separated list of users and groups as specified in /etc/cobbler/users.conf. For more information see the users.conf file as well as the Cobbler Wiki. In the default Cobbler configuration, this value is completely ignored, as is users.conf.
redhat- management-key	Management Classes (Management classes for external config management).
remote-boot- kernel	A URL pointing to the installation initrd of a distribution. If the bootloader has this support, it will directly download the kernel from this URL, instead of the directory of the TFTP client. Note: The kernel (or initrd below) will still be copied into the image directory of the TFTP server. The above kernel parameter is still needed (e.g. to build iso images, etc.). The advantage of letting the boot loader retrieve the kernel/initrd directly is the support of changing/updated distributions. E.g. openSUSE Tumbleweed is updated on the fly and if Cobbler would copy/cache the kernel/initrd in the TFTP directory, you would get a “kernel does not match distribution” (or similar) error when trying to install.
remote-boot- initrd	See remote-boot-kernel above.
template-files	This feature allows Cobbler to be used as a configuration management system. The argument is a space delimited string of key=value pairs. Each key is the path to a template file, each value is the path to install the file on the system. This is described in further detail on the Cobbler Wiki and is implemented using special code in the post install. Koan also can retrieve these files from a Cobbler server on demand, effectively allowing Cobbler to function as a lightweight templated configuration management system.