Bacio - a kickstart helper
What is it?
Kickstarting Linux needs a different vmlinuz and initrd per version. This gets to be a pain if you're running a PXE boot environment. What would be so much nicer would be to boot a generic PXE image, whether that be over the network or via a CD/image and let the resulting URL work out what version of the OS you're trying to install on the host.
There are plenty of 'big' answers to this - Cobbler and The Foreman are two that spring to mind - but I wanted something much smaller and simpler. You could go much smaller and simpler than this here, without a doubt, but originally I used the problem as an excuse to learn Catalyst, and then to learn Mojolicious.
What is it really?
This is very much 'work in progress' - it's barely documented and I threw it together rather quickly to replace a version I originally wrote in Catalyst.
It's now written as a Mojolicious lite app. You can run it with 'morbo' for testing, under Plack, Hypnotoad, whatever. Check the Mojo docs on deployment.
In short, you want a 'hosts.yaml' file in the same directory as the script. It needs to contain a couple of hashes containing Linux versions with the server and URL to get them from (see examples within). Then list MAC addresses, in the format shown within (dash separators). There's a template kickstart file embedded (search for ^@@ ks.txt.ep) that installs a pretty minimal OS. The root password, by default, is 'vagrant'.
I tend to kickstart then hand off to Puppet to do configuration work - and setting 'cm: 1' in the YAML file would ordinarily run Puppet (see line 341, it's commented out at the moment).
The original Catalyst version had a web interface for 'registering' hosts, editing and deleting hosts and managing the kickstart servers. Editing YAML is simpler ;-)
Tinker to your delight.
## Debugging
You can dump the 'database' as the app sees it by viewing /dumpdb. Easiest to
curl the url, as it renders as text. You can also test kickstart files with
curl -H'X-RHN-Provisioning-Mac-0: eth0 MACADDRESS'.