Step 3 of Building NUC Cluster
Installing and configuring Cobbler
Five Main Steps
Building a NUC cluster has the following five steps:
- Step 1. Connecting Macbook, switch and NUC
- Step 2. Configuring NUC gateway
- Step 3. Installing and configuring Cobbler on the NUC gateway
- Step 4. Provisioning NUC-worker hosts
- Step 5. Postconfigure – hiding switch behind the firewall
The installation and configuration of Cobbler for CentOS is very good described at: http://cobbler.github.io/manuals/quickstart/
Here we will just show th settings viable for out setup.
Cobbler settings
The main configuration file /etc/cobbler/settings should contain:
# default, localhost
next_server: 10.200.1.1
# default, localhost
server: 10.200.1.1
# set to 1 to enable Cobbler's DHCP management features.
# the choice of DHCP management engine is in /etc/cobbler/modules.conf
manage_dhcp: 1
# set to 1 to enable Cobbler's DNS management features.
# the choice of DNS mangement engine is in /etc/cobbler/modules.conf
manage_dns: 1
Make sure /etc/cobbler/modules.conf contains:
[dns]
module = manage_dnsmasq
[dhcp]
module = manage_dnsmasq
Finally, the contents of the /etc/dnsmasq.conf is the following, edit if needed:
[root@c2gw xadmin]# cat /etc/dnsmasq.conf
# Cobbler generated configuration file for dnsmasq
# Tue May 16 08:46:07 2017
interface=vlan2
dhcp-option=3,10.200.1.1
domain=c2.domain.com,10.200.1.0/24,local
dhcp-range=10.200.1.100,10.200.1.199
dhcp-sequential-ip
dhcp-script=/var/lib/misc/dnsmasq-assign.sh
dhcp-hostsfile=/var/lib/misc/dnsmasq.hosts
dhcp-leasefile=/var/lib/misc/dnsmasq.leases
server=8.8.8.8
dhcp-boot=pxelinux.0 #,boothost,10.200.1.101
enable-tftp
tftp-root=/var/lib/tftpboot
What is important here is the IP leasing range for vlan2 (10.200.1.100-10.200.1.199).
Check that the both are running:
systemctl status dnsmasq
systemctl status cobblerd
After making sure that both cobblerd and dnsmasq are running,
we can attach an empty NUC and try to PXE boot it.
Here we assume that one has configured Cobbler, imported OS image, created distro, edited the kickstart file as needed. All the files for PXE-booting must be in the /var/lib/tftpboot folder.
This tutorial relies on the well documented process of importing Linux distros to he Cobbler and editing kickstart templates. There are also some HOW-TO formed during the installation. Those have to be added later!
Result
Now a bare metal box could be provisioned with OS in the automatic manner!