Many premade cloud images (e.g. Fedora Cloud, Ubuntu Cloud) use some form of cloud-init to set instance/user metadata, such as hostnames and SSH keys. This works well when used in a cloud infrastructure such as EC2 or OpenStack that can seed this data, but not so well when used for local VMs, or an out-of-the-box XenServer installation.
However, cloud-init supports an CD/ISO datasource, which can be loaded whether running the machine locally in KVM, VirtualBox, or on a XenServer host.
This repository and guide aims to make this task a lot easier by pre-seeding a template and script. It draws heavily on existing resources (2, 3).
- Clone this repository. (optional: maybe create and checkout your own branch?)
- Modify the
meta-dataYAML file to specify yourinstance-idandlocal-hostname. - Modify the
cloud-configYAML file to specify a password and/or SSH keys; the cloud image determines the default user's login name (e.g.fedorain Fedora Cloud). - (optional) Commit your changes in git. This helps the build script name your ISO.
- Verify that you have the dependency
genisoimage. In RHEL/CentOS/Fedora,sudo yum install genisoimage; in Ubuntu/Debian,sudo apt-get install genisoimage. - Build the ISO using
./build.sh. You can either specify an output filename as the first parameter (e.g../build.sh output-file.iso), or you can let the script decide on the filename. If you are working inside a git repository, the build script should name your file after the branch and commit hash, such asfrost-init-20141228.4d48bab28b6d8f9c43f7b6e36238ef6863b41e90.iso. - If everything went well, attach the ISO file to your VM by methods conventional to your virtualization hypervisor.
- Boot the VM!
Some parts of this project are clearly not original. However, the bash script is
hereby licensed under the MIT License; see LICENSE.