At the moment, shell scripts as triggers wont work with cobbler. This is due to a bug. Unfortunately the developers wont fix it in the next few weeks or even months.
Triggers are a very welcome and powerful method to automate things before, during after installation of a system. At the moment it only works with python scripts. Since not every sysadmin knows python, but everyone knows to write bash scripts, this is a major drawback.
Cobbler is included in RHN Satellite 5.3 but in a quite old version. People tend to use a standalone cobbler install server installed from EPEL. Out of the box Cobbler is only usable on RHN Satellite servers with “deployment” entitlements which are quite expensive. Post-Install triggers can help admins to automate configuration management in RHEL and CentOS environments. For automating configuration with the RHN Satellite you need to have brought the “configuration management” entitlements too. With cobblers triggers you can partially replace the configuration management offered by RHN Satellite. Is this the reason why Red Hat developers are not very keen to solve the issue? I’m talking about ~USD 250 p.a/system.
I’ll keep you posted on the issue….