Foreman Discovery oVirt Node Plugin

There are couple of options how to get a oVirt Node Discovery image:

• Downloading existing one is the easiest method, but the image does not provide site-specific options.

• Downloading existing oVirt Node base image and injecting plugin into it. This is the recommended process of creating your own image. It is fast and still provides great flexibility of customization of the resulting image.

• Building own oVirt Node base image and injecting the plugin into it. This option must be used if you want to play with latest and greatest base image.

All three processes are described on this page.

Downloading image

We provide download links on the Foreman Discovery plugin page.

Injecting into existing base image

Warning: This process will set SELinux to permissive mode during the build of new iso image. Since this can compromise security, it is highly recommended to use dedicated VM guest for building images.

Although it is not possible to use stable version (3.0) for a base image, there are couple of nightly builds that can be used. It seems any image from version 3.0.3 can be used.

Discovery image 0.3.0 is built from 0.3.0-1.1.fc19 base iso image:

wget http://resources.ovirt.org/releases/node-base/nightly/iso/ovirt-node-iso-3.0.3-1.1.fc19.iso

We plan to release Fedora and RHEL based discovery images built from oVirt Node stable version 3.1.

Building the base image from git

Building the discovery image involves two main steps:

• Building base oVirt Node ISO from git.
• Building the discovery plugin and inserting it into the existing ISO.

Follow instructions on oVirt wiki to build the base oVirt Node ISO. Before proceeding, check the instruction on the oVirt page as they may change in future. What we have here might be different when using master.

We are using clean VM guest of Fedora 19 and directly from root account. If you want to build using different user, check out the building instructions above and setup sudo for some commands. Make sure you have at least 4 GB of free space on the partition you are building on.

First of all, fetch ovirt-node utilities and image builder:

git clone http://gerrit.ovirt.org/p/ovirt-node.git
git clone http://gerrit.ovirt.org/p/ovirt-node-iso.git

Build ovirt-node packages:

export OVIRT_NODE_BASE=$PWD
export OVIRT_CACHE_DIR=~/ovirt-cache
export OVIRT_LOCAL_REPO=file://${OVIRT_CACHE_DIR}/ovirt
mkdir -p $OVIRT_CACHE_DIR
yum install livecd-tools appliance-tools-minimizer fedora-packager \
    python-devel rpm-build createrepo selinux-policy-doc checkpolicy \
    selinux-policy-devel autoconf automake python-mock python-lockfile
cd $OVIRT_NODE_BASE
cd ovirt-node
export EXTRA_RELEASE=.foreman
./autogen.sh --with-image-minimizer
make publish

Build the base image and move it to the base directory:

cd $OVIRT_NODE_BASE
cd ovirt-node-iso
./autogen.sh --with-recipe=$OVIRT_NODE_BASE/ovirt-node/recipe
make iso
mv ovirt-node-iso-*.iso $OVIRT_NODE_BASE/

Now we are ready to inject our plugin.

Troubleshooting

If you encounter any problem during build, check internet connection first and try again. Occasionally, package cannot be downloaded from a nearest mirror so the process can fail. If the problem persists, you can try with exact githash or tag we were building from:

cd ovirt-node
make distclean
git checkout 2e54ec17b55e1ee80
cd ../ovirt-node-iso
make distclean
git checkout 5ac5557fc5521d644
cd ..

Also note that building EL6 image (even on EL6 guest builder) is not supported right now.

Building and injecting the discovery plugin

This second phase must be done on the same machine where base image was built. Please do not clean ovirt-node and cache directory as it is being used here.

Building the plugin is much faster than building the base ISO and you can repeat this step more times. The base (source) ISO file will not get modified so you do not need to create any backup.

Whole process can be described:

• Discovery plugin is build as an RPM and copied to OVIRT_CACHE directory.
• Base ISO is unpacked, mounted.
• Discovery RPM plugin is installed into the image making necessary changes.
• Many packages are uninstalled from the image shrinking size down to 170MB.
• Image is cleaned and wrapped back as ISO with ".foreman." version tag.
• Kernel image and init ram disk is extracted from the ISO.

First of all we build plugin RPMs. Before that, we are going to clear the RPMSDIR directory just to make sure it's clean and publish it to the cache repository.

cd $OVIRT_NODE_BASE
RPMSDIR=$(rpm --eval '%{_rpmdir}')
rm -f $RPMSDIR/noarch/*rpm
git clone https://github.com/theforeman/foreman_discovery.git
cd foreman_discovery/extra/ovirt-node-plugin-foreman
./autogen.sh
make rpms

Now, let's modify the base ISO image and install the plugin there.

cd $OVIRT_NODE_BASE

Create a new repo file in this directory with the following contents.

cat > ./foreman.repo <<'EOF'
[fedora-edit-node]
name=Fedora $releasever - $basearch
failovermethod=priority
baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/$releasever/Everything/$basearch/os/
#mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=fedora-$releasever&arch=$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-$basearch

[updates-edit-node]
name=Fedora $releasever - $basearch - Updates
failovermethod=priority
baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/updates/$releasever/$basearch/
#mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=updates-released-f$releasever&arch=$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-$basearch

[foreman]
name=Foreman nightly
baseurl=http://yum.theforeman.org/nightly/f19/$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-foreman
EOF

These three repositories will be used to install extra packages from Fedora 19 and also Foreman Proxy from nightly repository. You can switch to Foreman 1.3+ stable repository if you want. Injection is easy and quite fast:

ovirt-node/tools/edit-node \
    --repo foreman.repo \
    --nogpgcheck \
    --install $RPMSDIR/noarch/ovirt-node-plugin-foreman-0*.rpm \
    --verbose \
    --debug \
    ovirt-node-iso-*.iso
mv -f ovirt-node-iso-*.foreman.*.iso foreman.iso
test -d tftpboot && rm -rf tftpboot
livecd-iso-to-pxeboot foreman.iso

Note we are renaming the target ISO to foreman.iso prior extracting kernel and initrd, otherwise you'd need to change kernel boot options.

Finally, it's the time to copy those files to TFTP server:

scp tftpboot/initrd0.img root@tftp_server:/var/lib/tftpboot/boot/discovery-initrd.img
scp tftpboot/vmlinuz0 root@tftp_server:/var/lib/tftpboot/boot/discovery-vmlinuz

Setup Foreman templates

Read instructions about how to setup Foreman and PXE on the following pages:

• Foreman Discovery oVirt Node instructions
• Foreman Discovery instructions

Development

The image is locked down, the root account is locked and there is no ssh daemon running on the image. But all of this can be enabled and few more command line utilities can be installed, if the plugin is configured with this option:

make distclean
./autogen.sh --enable-debug

The root password is set to "development" and ssh daemon is listening on the standard port. Also logging of discover-host and foreman-proxy services is increased to DEBUG level. See /tmp directory.