Arch Linux

jolife

Member

Registered: 2020-02-28

Posts: 5

Ways to deploy a configured installation?

Hello Archians,
I hope this is an appropriate topic and that I have placed it in the correct area.

I have just completed configuring an Arch installation for project and now need to deploy it to 80+ machines. To do this, I would prefer to clone the master image on to the other machines and then bash out some generalizations since this seems to be the quickest means of deployment. However, I'm not sure if this is even an option, nor what would need to be generalized. At the very least, I suspect I would need to change the hostname, release the DHCP-assigned IP address, regenerate fstab, and maybe rebuild the initial ramdisk on each machine, and all before connecting it to the network. If this is the wrong way to go about it I'll go back to writing an installer or take up whatever solutions you might be able to offer. As I don't expect anyone to do any homework on my behalf, any leads (keywords) would be sufficient and appreciated.

Please ask if you need more details, and I'll provide what I can.

Thank you!

Last edited by jolife (2020-02-28 15:40:51)

twelveeighty

Member

Registered: 2011-09-04

Posts: 1,456

Re: Ways to deploy a configured installation?

This would be pretty simple if you're working on cloud infrastructure. I'm only familiar with Amazon AWS, but I'm sure all competitors have the same ability to "seed" each clone upon startup with a script - AWS calls it "user data". It's just a Bash script that gets run automatically as root the first time the machine is started. Are you working with physical bare-metal machines?

jasonwryan

Anarchist

From: .nz

Registered: 2009-05-09

Posts: 30,426

Website

Re: Ways to deploy a configured installation?

This is what Ansible/Puppet et al are for...

Last edited by jasonwryan (2020-02-29 01:06:04)

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jolife

Member

Registered: 2020-02-28

Posts: 5

Re: Ways to deploy a configured installation?

This would be pretty simple if you're working on cloud infrastructure. I'm only familiar with Amazon AWS, but I'm sure all competitors have the same ability to "seed" each clone upon startup with a script - AWS calls it "user data". It's just a Bash script that gets run automatically as root the first time the machine is started. Are you working with physical bare-metal machines?

Unfortunately this isn't cloud related. I'm deploying on bare-metal to distribute around our facility as test environments, so we're expecting the installations to possibly get destroyed an need to be re-imaged efficiently.

This is what Ansible/Puppet et al are for...

I did look into those services in the past to aid with an earlier iteration of the project. Unfortunately I have no budget to work with.

schard

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From: Hannover

Registered: 2016-05-06

Posts: 2,708

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Re: Ways to deploy a configured installation?

Ansible is free software and thusly does not require you to spend any budget in the monetary sense on it.
I just recently started using it for mass remote administration of systems.
I don't know, whether it is actually suitable for cloning systems.
In my company, I wrote some scripts for that, which create / restore a bsdtar'ed file system image and make the appropriate changes.
Maybe you get some inspiration from that:
https://gitlab.com/HOMEINFO/archlinux-scripts

Last edited by schard (2020-03-02 14:32:07)

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jolife

Member

Registered: 2020-02-28

Posts: 5

Re: Ways to deploy a configured installation?

Ansible is free software and thusly does not require you to spend any budget in the monetary sense on it.
I just recently started using it for mass remote administration of systems.
I don't know, whether it is actually suitable for cloning systems.
In my company, I wrote some scripts for that, which create / restore a bsdtar'ed file system image and make the appropriate changes.
Maybe you get some inspiration from that:
https://gitlab.com/HOMEINFO/archlinux-scripts

Oh wow that's incredible. I unfortunately wouldn't even know where to begin with making something similar for our system. It seems making an installation script is going to be my best recourse given my current skill level.