Sunday, November 15, 2009

cobbler

A headache for most network administrators or engineers setting up labs is the installation process of numerous servers and systems. With Fedora, PXE-installation and kickstart files takes some of the manual challenges out of the process, but it is still fairly task intensive.

Cobbler takes care of this issue and does it in style (Cobbler is an install server; batteries not included). It automates several of the tasks so that user doesn't end up switching between commands and applications when building new systems.

I personally liked a feature that I didn't think the system would have. One of the systems I was setting up did not have the BIOS updated to be able to do a PXE install. Cobbler has an option to create an installable CD/DVD and your system matches the rest that you have installed doing the automated PXE-install.

Fairly useful for organizations running a Linux servers network.