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<a name="questions">
<h3>Questions</h3>
</a>
<ul id="faq">
<li><a href="#whouses">Who Uses Cobbler?</a></li>
<li><a href="#supported">What Operating Systems Are Supported?</a></li>
<li><a href="#reinstalls">What are my non-PXE install options?</a></li>
<li><a href="#virt">How are virtual systems installed?</a></li>
<li><a href="#architecture">How does Cobbler work internally?</a></li>
<li><a href="#contribute">How can I contribute?</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>Answers</h3>
<a name="whouses">
<dt>Who Uses Cobbler?</dt>
</a>
<dd>Cobbler is in use in a lot of diverse configurations. Large companies, hosting datacenters, college labs, consultants, ISVs, developers, and home Linux users all use cobbler and koan in different ways. It is intended to cover the large configurations just as easily as the smaller ones -- and be non-complex for all classes of users.
<br />
<a href="#questions" class="back-to-top">Back to top</a>
</dd>
<a name="supported">
<dt>What Operating Systems Are Supported?</dt>
</a>
<dd>
Cobbler runs on RHEL 4 and later, Fedora 5 and later, and Centos 4 and later. Koan, cobbler's helper program, also works with RHEL 3.
<br />
<a href="#questions" class="back-to-top">Back to top</a>
</dd>
<a name="reinstalls">
<dt>What are my non-PXE install options?</dt>
</a>
<dd>Cobbler's helper program koan can be used on the target system to reinstall it's operating system with another operating system. This solution is ideal for those users who can not take advantage of PXE due to hardware, network, or policy constraints. For more information, see the <A HREF="./koan.html">koan</A> manpage documentation.
<br />
<a href="#questions" class="back-to-top">Back to top</a>
</dd>
<a name="virt">
<dt>How are virtual systems installed?</dt>
</a>
<dd>Cobbler's helper program, koan, when invoked on the remote host system, pulls down information from the remote cobbler server to begin a fully automated installation of a virtual guest. This works out of the box for any distribution that contains a Xen kernel. For more information, see the <A HREF="./koan.html">koan</A> manpage documentation.
<br />
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</dd>
<a name="architecture">
<dt>How does Cobbler work internally?</dt>
</a>
<dd>
When the administrator on the Cobbler server runs Cobbler commands, cobbler updates a configuration tree, which is stored in /var/lib/cobbler. Data from this configuration database is used to update various entities on the target operating system. Cobbler will restart services, as well as create trees of files in /tftpboot and /var/www/cobbler -- for use with PXE and koan, respectively.
<br/>
Koan interacts with cobbler by retrieving data over XMLRPC. Cobbler serves up XMLRPC using "cobblerd", which also has the dual purpose of logging syslog data from kickstart -- which is used in Cobbler's kickstart tracking feature. For a better understanding of how this works, see the <A HREF="./cobbler.html">Cobbler</A> manpage documentation.
<a href="#questions" class="back-to-top">Back to top</a>
</dd>
<a name="contribute">
<dt>How can I contribute?</dt>
</a>
<dd>
Send in bug reports, patches, ideas, or comments. We're interested in hearing about your real-world provisioning challenges and how we can solve them for system administrators everywhere.
<br />
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</dd>
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