Bug 866765

Summary:	beaker-lab-controller still depends on cobbler for fetching boot loaders
Product:	[Retired] Beaker	Reporter:	Dan Callaghan <dcallagh>
Component:	lab controller	Assignee:	Dan Callaghan <dcallagh>
Status:	CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE	QA Contact:	tools-bugs <tools-bugs>
Severity:	unspecified	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	0.9	CC:	aigao, asaha, dcallagh, rmancy, tools-bugs, xjia, xma
Target Milestone:	0.17
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	Unspecified
OS:	Unspecified
Whiteboard:	Misc
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2014-06-10 23:27:55 UTC	Type:	Bug
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Dan Callaghan 2012-10-16 05:19:44 UTC

The beaker-lab-controller package still Requires cobbler, even though we don't actually use Cobbler at runtime. The only reason it's still there is because our docs tell users to run get_loaders during installation, to populate /var/lib/tftpboot with boot loaders.

We should devise our own means of handling that instead. Some ideas:

* Steal Cobbler's get_loaders script and package it ourselves.

* Depend on syslinux instead, and copy pxelinux.0 into place (in %post, or on starting beaker-provision). Users will have to grab the other boot loaders themselves manually. The problem with this approach is that it would tie us to i686/x86_64 for the server.

* Make users grab all the boot loaders manually.

Comment 1 xjia 2013-06-06 02:54:40 UTC

Reproduce on beaker-devel:
[root@lab-devel-02 ~]# yum deplist beaker-lab-controller | grep cobbler
  dependency: cobbler >= 1.4
   provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-6.el6eso
   provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-15.el6eso
   provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-16.el6eso
   provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-12.el6eso
   provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-3.el6eso
   provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-8.el6eso
   provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-11.el6eso
   provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-7.el6eso
   provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-16.el6eso
  dependency: cobbler >= 1.4
   provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-6.el6eso
   provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-15.el6eso
   provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-16.el6eso
   provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-12.el6eso
   provider: cobbler.noarch 2.0.12-3.el6eso

Comment 3 Dan Callaghan 2014-03-31 07:34:32 UTC

I think we can depend on syslinux on x86-based platforms, and beaker-provision can just copy or link /usr/share/syslinux/pxelinux.0 to the tftp directory on startup if that file exists. So this is just a best-effort attempt at covering 80% of use cases automatically (x86 BIOS-based systems and virtual machines).

We could then also add some docs to the section about "adding your system to Beaker", which would:
* explain that you need a suitable network boot loader image in the tftp root
* list the boot loader types we support, with suggestions on how to get pre-built binaries
* also point at Cobbler's loader binaries as a convenience: https://github.com/cobbler/cobbler.github.com/tree/master/loaders
This ties in with bug 1080285 (document layout of tftp root).

Comment 4 Dan Callaghan 2014-04-01 02:31:30 UTC

On Gerrit: http://gerrit.beaker-project.org/2994

Not addressing bug 1080285 for now.

Comment 7 Dan Callaghan 2014-06-10 23:27:55 UTC

Beaker 0.17.0 has been released.