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Spacewalk + debian

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wumfi
Posts: 25
Joined: 2011-06-15 11:52

Spacewalk + debian

#1 Post by wumfi »

Hi,

I'm setting up a Spacewalk server here at work so that we have repeatable deploys/configs for various VMs. All going swimmingly with CentOS.

I'm led to believe that Spacewalk does now kind of support Debian, but a whole morning of google has been fruitless. I keep landing on the same pages from devops-blog.net which don't work. The posts were written 3+ years ago, so I suspect that's the issue.

What I'm trying to achieve is to kickstart a Debian install from a blank VM (VMWare). I can't even seem to get the repos into Spacewalk!

Has anyone managed to achieve this (or something similar)?

Thanks,
Pete

Caveat:
- I can use other provisioning tools, but we are largely CentOS here (with a few Debian boxes), so I'm leaning towards Spacewalk as a solution if possible.
- I've tried FAI and a couple of others, but they seem over complicated for what we are trying to achieve.
Unix is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who its friends are.

pendrachken
Posts: 1394
Joined: 2007-03-04 21:10
Location: U.S.A. - WI.

Re: Spacewalk + debian

#2 Post by pendrachken »

Not 100% sure on what you are asking for...

For VMware VMs you should be able to do a base install ( via CD1 / netinstall ETC ) to get everything you need, put aside the virt disk, and then copy it to fire up clones on demand.

Other than that https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/wiki ... nts#Debian has some shitty advice. DON'T add the SID repository to install software on testing / stable unless you REALLY REALLY REALLY know what you are doing with Debian and the apt system.


That being said, apt-transport-spacewalk is in jessie ( stable ). If you really need the versions from unstable ( sid) you would be better off looking at how to backport them to your stable install. The debian wiki has a decent page on how to start backporting.
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wumfi
Posts: 25
Joined: 2011-06-15 11:52

Re: Spacewalk + debian

#3 Post by wumfi »

Thanks for your help. To be clear, what I've been asked to do is to set up a provisioning server that can do repeatable and scripted builds.

It is for a dev environment which can be deleted at a moments notice, so they want something in place so we can quickly rebuild the 5 servers. The provisioning tool will just be to stand up the VMs and install the required software. The rest of the granular config is being done via Ansible.

I've actually started looking at Fog now (https://fogproject.org). It's really just a glorified imaging tool (think Ghost), but has fine enough control to do what I want. At least I think so!

It's such a shame that Spacewalk doesn't have decent Debian support yet though.
Unix is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who its friends are.

pendrachken
Posts: 1394
Joined: 2007-03-04 21:10
Location: U.S.A. - WI.

Re: Spacewalk + debian

#4 Post by pendrachken »

wumfi wrote:Thanks for your help. To be clear, what I've been asked to do is to set up a provisioning server that can do repeatable and scripted builds.

It is for a dev environment which can be deleted at a moments notice, so they want something in place so we can quickly rebuild the 5 servers. The provisioning tool will just be to stand up the VMs and install the required software. The rest of the granular config is being done via Ansible.

I've actually started looking at Fog now (https://fogproject.org). It's really just a glorified imaging tool (think Ghost), but has fine enough control to do what I want. At least I think so!

It's such a shame that Spacewalk doesn't have decent Debian support yet though.


Sounds like you are trying to go about it the harder(er) way.
  1. Build up a base VM with all of the dev tools / settings you need and keep access to it restricted to networking admins. Apply updates as needed, and keep dev data off of the image to keep it as small as possible. Keep the VM shut down as much as possible. Keep the VM disk image as a single file. Keep the VM disk image in a place away from where the provisioning server looks for images.
  2. shutdown the VM and copy the disk image and *.vmx ( or just the whole folder that contains the VM image and settings files ) to the folder where the provisioning server looks for it.
  3. do proper Dev data backups / restores on the VM. ( this could be some scripted rsync jobs or anything really. Workstation / vSphere should allow you to take snapshots of the VM too to roll back to in case it falls over) Just make sure your devs follow proper procedure and ONLY store dev data in folders you know about, and will be backing up.
  4. If the devs break it repeat steps 2-3.

When it comes time for upgrades / updates you can try them on a copy of the base VM image to make sure nothing goes wrong. You can then update the Dev images ( after proper backups of the Dev Data are made, of course ), and if there are no further problems THEN update / upgrade the base VM image.


Seems like it is a lot of work, but this is the best way to actually REDUCE the amount of work you will need to do.... basically it all comes down to modifying the base install image you make last to make sure nothing in an update messes anything up, and if it does.... getting back to a known good clean state as fast as possible.
fortune -o
Your love life will be... interesting.
:twisted: How did it know?

The U.S. uses the metric system too, we have tenths, hundredths and thousandths of inches :-P

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wumfi
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Joined: 2011-06-15 11:52

Re: Spacewalk + debian

#5 Post by wumfi »

Thanks for the detailed response. And yes, I agree with your approach.

However, you mention the "provisioning server" which is the crux of my problem. Whilst keeping the base VM images/disks safely stored away would be ok, it still comes down to the provisioning tool. So back to my original post, it was about how to get Spacewalk to actually provision Debian boxes. It's not something I can figure out with the sparse documentation. Perhaps using PXE to deploy a Debian host via Spacewalk isn't even possible?

At the moment, I have Fog running very nicely. In testing, it's able to reliably image the machine, and then build it again from that image. So from that aspect, it does appear I have a solution.

My management are very keen on getting Spacewalk running though as it's one of the best tools to manage/update an estate. Therefore I'm going to stick with Fog for imaging and then look into registering existing clients in Spacewalk.
Unix is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who its friends are.

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