ULOS - Debian Image

Universal Live(sport) Operating System - ULOS. Live netboot OS based on Linux Debian.

Small OS which can boot from PXE (netboot) and do some automated tasks. Tasks can be passed to os via Kernel CMDLINE. OS boots from network, download tasks / scripts and execute them via SystemD Unit.

Download pre-builded image

Look on available releases here on github: Releases for download

Build your own

Just clone the repository and run the build. Run it on compatible environment (Debian or Ubuntu (and its clones), Mint and other Debian Like distribution).

git clone https://github.com/rvojcik/ULOS-Live.git
cd ULOS-Live/
git submodule update --init --recursive

# Do whatever changes you want

mkdir mybuild
sudo make DESTDIR=mybuild all

Look into .gitlab-ci.yml how we build our release.

Why ?

Originaly we developed this for deploying servers to production environment in Livesport. We also learn a lot from it. You can use it with Foreman to deploy your images or as recovery netboot system or as base start to create disk-less systems. Now it's used in our infrastructure for various maintenance tasks or tests.

It's Free and Open

Use it as you wish, for learning or for your tasks. We publish it under GPL v3.

Basic Usage

Netboot example with pxelinux

kernel vmlinuz
append initrd=initrd.img boot=live root=http://myaddress/debian-buster.img root_pass=DebuOnly1

Please for security reasons root_pass= use only for debugging. In production systems use ssh keys instead.

System parameters

Kernel basic params

This image support few kernel parameters to handle some basics around access and authorization and automatic job execution.

boot=, if you want to boot live image use boot=live
root=, when using boot=live you can provide image address as root parameter. System automatically configure networking and download root image using wget
ulos_serial_console, set serial console for output from executor tasks (default ttyS0)
ulos_tty_console, set tty console for output from executor tasks (default tty0)

Initrd image support DNS resolution so it's not a problem to use DNS names instead of IPs.

System Access parameters

root_pass=, sets root password. By default there is no root password and there is not reason for that. However for debug purposes you can use this parameter to set some debug password. I encourage you to use sshkeys instead of passwords.
sshkey_src=, address with authorized_keys to retrieve for root and debian user. This keys will be applied to root user and to debian user (standard user with sudo)

Automatic Job execution

All these tasks are executed from ulos-executor.service by systemd after startup

run_task=, address where system download script and execute it as main task
before_task=, address where to get script which will be executed before run_task. If before_task fails, system don't execute the run_task.

Utilities preinstalled in image

Look into Makefile for env_packages= variable