Installing Cobbler

The first step is to install cobbler, and if required, the cobbler-web package.

sudo apt-get install cobbler cobbler-web

Before the installation can be completed, cobbler will request to set the password for the default administrator user, cobbler as follows:

It is important to set the password for this user to be able to access the cobbler Web Administration Interface.

Checking the Configuration

After installation, it is always a great idea to check cobbler's configuration to see if everything is as it should. Cobbler provides an special command for such purpose.

sudo cobbler check

With an output similar to:

The following are potential configuration items that you may want to fix:

1 : some network boot-loaders are missing from /var/lib/cobbler/loaders, you may run 'cobbler get-loaders' to download them, or, if you only want to handle x86/x86_64 netbooting, you may ensure that you have installed a *recent* version of the syslinux package installed and can ignore this message entirely.  Files in this directory, should you want to support all architectures, should include pxelinux.0, menu.c32, elilo.efi, and yaboot. The 'cobbler get-loaders' command is the easiest way to resolve these requirements.
2 : fencing tools were not found, and are required to use the (optional) power management features. install cman or fence-agents to use them

Restart cobblerd and then run 'cobbler sync' to apply changes.

As per the example above the potential configuration items might need to be fixed in order to have cobbler working correctly. In our case, we can address 1, and 2 is completely optional.

Once this has been addressed, run the following to apply the changes:

sudo cobbler sync

Cobbler Web interface

If cobbler-web is installed, there should be a /etc/apache2/conf.d/cobbler_web.conf file that configures Apache to run the Cobbler web interface.

The cobbler web interface is served by apache at http://<hostname>/cobbler_web

If cobbler does not prompt you for a password, it should set the default username and password to cobbler / cobbler, however, if the default does not work, you may set the password by running:

htdigest /etc/cobbler/users.digest "Cobbler" cobbler 

Which will prompt you for a new password.

Once you have updated the password remember to run

cobbler sync