Added net installs for all x86_64 centos boxes. #11
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own kickstart file so it pulls from the propper direcotry. The mirrors have all been changed to the stanford mirror for consistency.
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Hmmm....yeah, interesting problem that a kickstart would be necessary for each version to be netbootable - let me think on this... |
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I couldn't come up with a clean solution to change the version number depending on what version you were installing. As a lowly developer I don't have much experience with kickstart files. When I get to $work tomorrow I can ask our ops people if there is a better solution. |
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Within a kickstart, I've been able to use environment variables successfully to parametize them - I've had less success with preseed files on Ubuntu/Debian. I want to try to see if I can rig up something to pass something through from the json template. That being said, thank you for the submission - I appreciate the contribution. If there's no easy solution to the parametization conundrum, the solution I know will work is to place tokens in the kickstart file and dynamically replace them via the Makefile before running the "packer build" (another advantage to being script-driven to generate files). One way or the other we'll get this sorted. |
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I appreciate your work on this. You should really consider submitting your boxes to http://www.vagrantbox.es/. I had lost all hope of finding a centos5 box until I found packer, which led me to your repo. It seems like you've really put a lot of work into this and it is definitely appreciated on my end. Let me know if there is anything else I can contribute. |
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The token-replacement approach might be best because we could also do away with having one kickstart for the netboot and another for the DVD version. But I want to think on it a bit more, as I don't want to have to force people to use the Makefile, and I'd prefer the box templates to work standalone. Looks like with a little more investigation two birds could be stoned ;-) |
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it looks like this http://www.packer.io/docs/templates/user-variables.html could be very useful if packer processes the kickstart file. I'll give it a go and post back with results. |
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Well packer doesn't directly pass variables to those separate kickstart templates. After some research, it appears you can use perl/php/ruby to template those kickstart files. You can also put the kickstart file directly in the builder and then use the template variables provided by packer. |
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FYI Makefile now works again - "make list" to print out a list of boxes, and "make /.box" to build a single box (example: "make vmware/centos510-net.box") |
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Yes, looks like scripting is going to be the way to go, alas: http://www.dizwell.com/2013/04/08/conditional-kickstart/ A Makefile can handle this easily. |
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And an ideal candidate ultimately for extension of Packer variable support to be able to replace tokens in script files as well as the template.json |
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Agreed, if packer could handle this, there would be a lot of very happy sysadmins in the world. I talked to some of the opts guys I know and they all template using perl. If you'd like to set up a hacking branch for that I wouldn't be opposed to working on it. I am a perl developer by trade so a CGI script or something like it to format be config file would definitely be in my wheelhouse. |
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OK, took awhile, but I think I am going with the replaceable tokens in the script approach. I'm in the process of updating the templates so the iso_url & checksum can be variables (among other things), and I'll add some more Makefile logic as a preprocessing step to create new ks-net.cfg.template & pressed-net.cfg.template files so that the important lines in these files can be replaced. I was hoping perhaps Mitchell might add this to packer proper, but it can be done just as easily outside the tool in the Makefile. I just don't like having a ks-net.cfg/preseed-net.cfg for each flavor of the OS - too many files to manage. |
Each box has its own kickstart file so it pulls from the proper directory. The
mirrors have all been changed to the stanford mirror for consistency.