[Voyage-linux] Automatic Deployment and Configuration

[Rajarajan Rajamani]

The scenario you are having is very similar to many projects in the DevOps
environment where puppet/ansible/salt are the way to go.

Given the small footprint of alix boards, I would suggest ansible as it is
ssh based and that is already there. Puppet will need a client/agent
installed on each node along with ruby and many other packages. Another
difference between the two is that only the puppet client will call back
home periodically whereas ansible is a one-shot operation - so nodes that
are not reachable when the ansible playbook is run will not get configured
when the do get connected at a later point of time. Though, one could wrap
ansible in cron to do it.

Now the part you mention about "boot and download the whole system" is
getting into the realm of PXE boot where the whole image of the OS is
downloaded. That could also be done (but I dont know much about a PXE
bootable image of Voyage Linux - I am sure it might be there somewhere). In
addition, the BIOS of the board (Alix etc) needs to be able to do PXE boot
by way of initializing ethernet from BIOS to download and load the OS after
poweron.

Raj



On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 7:20 AM Martin Kos <martin at kos.li> wrote:

> Hi all
>
> i have the need to deploy a lot of alix boards with voyage linux running
> on them. the have a "common" configuration, but still each alix has it's
> own settings.
> one thing is the inital configuration of the alix, but then when they
> are deployed and i want to make changes to the configurations, that
> should be automated and scalable. the problem is that not all of the
> boxes are reachable from outside, so they need to have some "call home"
> feature.
> i have thought about using puppet for this purpose? but haven't checked
> the details yet.
> one idea was to make some kind of dual boot system, where one system is
> a "read only, never change" system that can make the inital installation
> of the seconde "real" system, and that will "always" work. which means
> that in case of any damage to the real system, the other system can
> boot, download the whole real system and configure it. so also upgrades
> to newer version of voyage linux etc would be possible, or just "reset"
> the system to the inital state.
> what do you think about this ideas? anybody tried something simliar?
>
> greets
>  KoS
>
>
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