So we have been using Cobbler at TomTom for quite a while now to manage the deployment of some systems here. A whole lot of these systems are in out Continuous Test and Integration system, a home written thing but very similar to autobuild.

One of the really cool features in Cobbler that I get excited about is power management, this works for a whole bunch of stuff, out-of-band management cards, APC master switches and pretty much anything else you want to throw at it, neat huh!

The developer of the CTI system had wanted for a while to power down the systems when they are not in use to save power. However with so many different systems doing this was a pain for him. I heard about this and due to the awesomeness that is Cobbler was able to give him one small script that uses the Cobbler XMLRPC API to power off any system the CTI system uses. This is the joys of having a central system where all this information about your hosts, in this case the power management type, is recorded. This is usually called a Configuration Management Database for those who have not heard of this before. You can refer to that information store any time you need and have code switch what it is doing based on that…or write a framework (like Cobbler) so you only have to do that once.

So now we have managed to reduce our power consumption here, neat stuff but I think we have a long way to go yet before we can really be called ‘green’ lol.