As I keep forgetting to update the blog feed, I’ve decided to discontinue it and just use the mailing list.
You can always get up to the date Cobbler news by reading the mailing list, which has public archives.
Here’s the link.
Also you are welcome to stop by #cobbler on irc.freenode.net for Q&A at any time — we’d be happy to have you!
0.6.2 has been out for a while, and I forgot I had an RSS feed to update 
0.6.2 mainly brings the WebUI up to a whole new level, and for instructions on using that, see the Wiki on Fedora Hosted Projects.
See the mailing list for more details.
Work goes on towards 0.6.3, which mainly focuses on substantial performance increases for some of Cobbler’s larger install bases. The goal here is to develop a storage backend more suitable to install bases in the 5k-10k+ range that have outgrown the YAML backend. There are of course miscellaneous and bugfixes to be included as well. The other thing that 0.6.3 brings is the much wanted multiple NIC support for configurations — which works for both virtual machines and physical machines alike. While multiple NICs were supported before (only in kickstart), they can now be expressed directly in the Cobbler configuration without resorting to extra tricks.
At the same time, community development interest is growing in a lot of directions, and there have been a lot of great feature requests (and patches!). It’s a great time to join the development effort. Stop by #func on irc.freenode.net and say hello.
This is an update for folks who have just been reading the RSS feed, and not the email list.
0.6.1 is now out, and is available in FC-6, F-7, Fedora-devel, and EPEL-4/5 testing. This is mainly a bugfix/improvements release, but also adds zeroconf support for discovering the location of a cobbler server from koan.
Here’s a Cobbler Tutorial from Red Hat Magazine. It covers basic Cobbler setup, importing media, and some of the most commonly used provisioning commands for PXE and virtualization.
A new stable release of Cobbler and Koan are out! Official release announcement here.
This post to the mailing list contains some information about a new Wiki for user submitted howtos and other articles — plus a new bug/RFE tracker.
In addition, lately upstream koan has gained support for provisioning qemu/kvm guests as well as installing to partitions and LVM volume groups. These are slated for inclusion in the next stable release, after some further testing.
A new testing version of cobbler and koan are now out. New features: Dnsmasq support, profile inheritance, flexibile system names, improved templating options, and more. See the mailing list thread for further information.
With 0.5.0 is the next testing release of Cobbler. So, what’s going in?
- Support for DHCP Management via dnsmasq, as well as the existing ISC dhcpd support.
- Naming systems after arbitrarily labels. Specify –ip, –mac, and –hostname independently for “cobbler system add” commands.
- Seperating out Pre and Post triggers, and allowing pre-triggers to validate additions before they are performed
- Control over the arguments fed to createrepo and reduce mirroring time
- Improved error and warning messages, plus manpage edits
- Infrastructure needed to support future i18n
- Getting properties about one specific object: “cobbler list system $name”
- General cleanup and code reorganization
- Making all variables given to any “add” command available to the Cheetah templating engine as $variable.
- Potential support for profile inheritance (?)
- … (?)
Have other ideas, or perhaps an interesting patch or two? Let us know.
Koan is now happy with SELinux enforcing mode again.
