Cobbler is an open-source installation server that automates the provisioning of Linux installations. It's a powerful tool that makes the installation process faster and easier. In this tutorial, we will learn how to install Cobbler on Fedora CoreOS latest.
Before we proceed with the installation process, you need to have the following:
Cobbler requires several dependencies to run correctly. We need to install them before we proceed.
sudo dnf install epel-release -y
sudo dnf install python3 python3-devel python3-django python3-rpm-macros python3-twisted pykickstart debmirror fence-agents syslinux tftp-server xinetd httpd dhcp -y
Once the installation completes successfully, we can proceed to the next step.
Before we start the Cobbler service, we need to configure it. To do that, we must edit the configuration file /etc/cobbler/settings.
sudo vi /etc/cobbler/settings
In this file, we need to update the following parameters:
server: 127.0.0.1
next_server: 127.0.0.1
manage_dhcp: 1
manage_dns: 1
pxe_just_once: 1
pxe_template_name: 'menu'
Save and close the file.
Cobbler doesn't run as the root user. We need to create a new user account to run the Cobbler service.
sudo useradd cobbler
sudo passwd cobbler
Enter a secure password for the new user account.
Next, we need to restart the following services to apply the new changes:
sudo systemctl restart httpd
sudo systemctl restart xinetd
sudo systemctl restart cobblerd
We need to allow the following ports to access Cobbler from the external world:
To allow these ports, we can execute the following command:
sudo firewall-cmd --add-port=69/tcp --add-port=80/tcp --add-port=25151/tcp --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --reload
Finally, we can start importing the images into Cobbler. To do that, we need to execute the following command:
sudo cobbler import /path/to/your/iso/files
Once it completes, we can start installing the images via network boot.
Cobbler is a versatile installation server that automates the provisioning of Linux installations, making it faster and more comfortable. In this tutorial, we learned how to install Cobbler on Fedora CoreOS and configure it to run correctly. With the correct configuration, Cobbler can make the installation process faster and easier.
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