9. Limitations and Surprises

9.1. Restarting the daemon

Once you have a Cobbler distro imported or manually added you have to make sure the source for the Kernel & initrd is available all the time. Thus I highly recommend you to add the ISOs to your /etc/fstab to make them persistent across reboots. If you forget to remount them the Cobbler daemon won’t start!

9.2. Kernel options

The user (so you) is responsible for generating the correct quoting of the Kernel Command Line. We manipulate the arguments you give us in a way that we add wrapping double quotes around them when the value contains a space.

Kernel options are stored as a flat key/value mapping where each option name resolves to a single value, None or a list of values (when the option is provided multiple times). Nested dictionaries are not supported and will lead to unexpected behaviour later in the provisioning flow. Non-string scalar values such as integers or booleans are stringified when rendered onto the kernel command line.

The Linux Kernel describes its quoting at: The kernel’s command-line parameters

Consult the documentation of your operating system for how it deals with this if it is not Linux.

9.3. Special Case: Uyuni/SUSE Manager

Note

SUSE Manager is a flavor of Uyuni. The term Uyuni refers to both pieces of software in this context.

Uyuni uses Cobbler for driving auto-installations. When using Cobbler in the context of Uyuni, you need to know that Cobbler is not seen as the source of truth by Uyuni. This means, in case you don’t have any auto-installation configured in Uyuni, the content visible in Cobbler is deleted.

Because of the same reason, during the runtime of Cobbler you may see systems popping on and off as the content of Cobbler is managed by Uyuni (in particular, the taskomatic task kickstart_cleanup executes cleanup on the Cobbler content)