FAI Lab With VirtualBox (Part II)

Note: This post is the second in a series of posts about setting up an FAI lab using VirtualBox. The first post can be found here.

In Part I of this series we configured a VirtualBox virtual machine with a basic installation of FAI. We also configured a virtual network and connected our FAI server to it. Finally, we set up a DHCP/TFTP server to allow us to PXE boot clients into the FAI nfsroot. The next step is to boot up our first FAI client virtual machine to make sure the PXE process works correctly. Then, we’ll configure FAI to install and configure Ubuntu Server on our client.

Testing PXE Booting

Create a new VM to test PXE booting. These commands will be familiar from Part I:

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VBoxManage createvm --name pxetest --ostype Ubuntu_64 --register
VBoxManage modifyvm pxetest --memory 512 --boot1 disk --boot2 dvd --boot3 net --rtcuseutc on
VBoxManage modifyvm pxetest --nic1 hostonly --hostonlyadapter1 vboxnet0
VBoxManage createhd --size 10000 --filename $HOME/Library/VirtualBox/HardDisks/pxetest-root
VBoxManage storagectl pxetest --name sata0 --add sata
VBoxManage storageattach pxetest --storagectl sata0 --device 0 --port 0 --type hdd --medium $HOME/Library/VirtualBox/HardDisks/pxetest-root.vdi

We’re going to need to know the MAC address of the host in order to configure dnsmasq to PXE boot it.

plathrop ~ » VBoxManage showvminfo pxetest | grep MAC
NIC 1:           MAC: 080027928409, Attachment: Host-only Interface 'vboxnet0', Cable connected: on, Trace: off (file: none), Type: 82540EM, Reported speed: 0 Mbps, Boot priority: 0, Promisc Policy: deny

As you can see, the MAC for the “pxetest” VM is 08:00:27:92:84:09. Add the MAC to /etc/ethers on the “faiserver” VM, along with the hostname you want this system to use.

08:00:27:92:84:09	pxetest

You’ll need to add a record to /etc/hosts as well, mapping the name (pxetest) to an IP address from the range we configured dnsmasq to pass out (192.168.0.10 onward):

192.168.0.10    pxetest

Restart dnsmasq on the “faiserver” VM and boot your “pxetest” VM. You should see something like this in the VirtualBox window:

Despite the error message, this means we’ve succeeded! The “pxetest” VM received an IP address from dnsmasq, and the required options to PXE boot. If you look at your dnsmasq logs (in /var/log/daemon.log on Ubuntu) you’ll see something like this:

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Nov  8 00:30:59 faiserver dnsmasq-tftp[5065]: sent /srv/tftp/fai/pxelinux.0 to 192.168.0.10
Nov  8 00:30:59 faiserver dnsmasq-tftp[5065]: file /srv/tftp/fai/pxelinux.cfg/2b176787-c273-4728-a8db-7af779beb2b3 not found
Nov  8 00:30:59 faiserver dnsmasq-tftp[5065]: file /srv/tftp/fai/pxelinux.cfg/01-08-00-27-92-84-09 not found
Nov  8 00:30:59 faiserver dnsmasq-tftp[5065]: file /srv/tftp/fai/pxelinux.cfg/C0A8000A not found
Nov  8 00:30:59 faiserver dnsmasq-tftp[5065]: file /srv/tftp/fai/pxelinux.cfg/C0A8000 not found
Nov  8 00:30:59 faiserver dnsmasq-tftp[5065]: file /srv/tftp/fai/pxelinux.cfg/C0A800 not found
Nov  8 00:30:59 faiserver dnsmasq-tftp[5065]: file /srv/tftp/fai/pxelinux.cfg/C0A80 not found
Nov  8 00:30:59 faiserver dnsmasq-tftp[5065]: file /srv/tftp/fai/pxelinux.cfg/C0A8 not found
Nov  8 00:30:59 faiserver dnsmasq-tftp[5065]: file /srv/tftp/fai/pxelinux.cfg/C0A not found
Nov  8 00:30:59 faiserver dnsmasq-tftp[5065]: file /srv/tftp/fai/pxelinux.cfg/C0 not found
Nov  8 00:30:59 faiserver dnsmasq-tftp[5065]: file /srv/tftp/fai/pxelinux.cfg/C not found
Nov  8 00:30:59 faiserver dnsmasq-tftp[5065]: file /srv/tftp/fai/pxelinux.cfg/default not found

As we can see, the PXE boot failed because no PXE config was located for the “pxetest” VM. Let’s fix that. The command we use is fai-chboot(8), like this:

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faiserver ~ » sudo fai-chboot -I -F -v 192.168.0.10
Booting kernel vmlinuz-2.6.38-grml
 append initrd=initrd.img-2.6.38-grml ip=dhcp
    FAI_FLAGS=verbose,sshd,createvt

192.168.0.10 has 192.168.0.10 in hex C0A8000A
Writing file /srv/tftp/fai/pxelinux.cfg/C0A8000A for 192.168.0.10

Note: you can ignore the -grml stuff; I’m using a custom kernel and initrd in my environment, it should not affect the rest of this article.

The -F option sets some useful flags for FAI, -I tells FAI to run an automatic installation, and -v gives us verbose output. The IP address is the IP we assigned to the “pxetest” VM. As you can see in line 7, this command creates the file /srv/tftp/fai/pxelinux.cfg/C0A8000A, which is one of the files that the TFTP server was looking for (see line 4 of the previous listing). Now that this is in place, if you reboot the “pxetest” VM, you should see the system PXE boot, mount the nfsroot, and then dump you out to a prompt when FAI fails (because we haven’t created an FAI configuration yet). If the machine PXE boots fine, but doesn’t get the correct IP address from DHCP, you probably did not disable the VirtualBox DHCP server on vboxnet0 as described in “Setting up the FAI server VM” in Part I.

Installing Ubuntu via FAI

Now we need to configure FAI to actually perform an installation. To start with we’ll need to copy the example configuration provided by FAI. This will give us a simple FAI configuration to build on top of.

sudo cp -a /usr/share/doc/fai-doc/examples/simple/* /srv/fai/config

We’ll also need to NFS export our configuration directory, so we add it to /etc/exports:

/srv/fai/config  192.168.0.2/16(async,ro,no_subtree_check,no_root_squash)

Activate this export with sudo exportfs -a. We also need to do one last bit of network configuration to allow our FAI clients to speak to the outside world during the install process. We’ll need to make sure the “faiserver” VM is configured as a NAT gateway. Add the following line to /etc/sysctl.conf (or uncomment it, if you have the default Ubuntu sysctl.conf):

net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 in /etc/sysctl.conf

Activate this sysctl setting with sudo sysctl -p. Next, we’ll configure iptables:

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sudo iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o eth1 -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A FORWARD -i eth1 -o eth0 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

As root, save this iptables ruleset: iptables-save >/etc/network/pxenet-nat.ipt. Add a line to /etc/network/interfaces under the eth1 section to restore the iptables rules when the interface comes up.

        up /sbin/iptables-restore </etc/network/pxenet-nat.ipt

At this point our FAI server should be ready too bootstrap clients with Debian. You can go ahead and create a new virtual machine and give it a try if you’d like (or destroy and recreate the disk for the “pxetext” VM and try it there). As I said, though, I’d like to be able to bootstrap Ubuntu Server VMs. Although official support for “FAI multi-distribution” isn’t available in FAI 3.x, it works fine; we’ll just have to pull in a couple pieces of FAI 4.x.

The first thing we’ll need is a “basefile” for the version of Ubuntu we’d like to install. The config examples for FAI 4.x (available here) include a mk-basefile shell script (under basefiles/) which can be used to build the basefiles for your distribution of choice. Currently, it supports Debian 6.0 (which we can install out-of-the-box with FAI 3.x), Ubuntu 10.04, CentOS 5/6, and Scientific Linux Cern 5/6. I want to install Ubuntu 10.10, so I need to patch the shell script to add support.

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--- mk-basefile.orig      2011-09-07 17:27:24.000000000 -0700
+++ mk-basefile           2011-11-09 11:55:25.000000000 -0800
@@ -30,3 +30,3 @@
 MIRROR_DEBIAN=http://kueppers/debian/
-MIRROR_UBUNTU=http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/ubuntu/
+MIRROR_UBUNTU=http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/
 MIRROR_CENTOS=http://mirror.netcologne.de/
@@ -37,3 +37,4 @@
 EXCLUDE_LUCID=dhcp3-client,dhcp3-common
-
+EXCLUDE_MAVERICK=dhcp3-client,dhcp3-common
+INCLUDE_MAVERICK=aptitude,tasksel

@@ -180,2 +181,12 @@

+maverick() {
+
+    local arch=$1
+
+    check
+    debootstrap --arch $arch --exclude=${EXCLUDE_MAVERICK} --include=${INCLUDE_MAVERICK} maverick $xtmp ${MIRROR_UBUNTU}
+    cleanup-deb
+    tarit
+}
+

@@ -191,2 +202,3 @@
     LUCID32      LUCID64
+    MAVERICK32   MAVERICK64
     SQUEEZE32    SQUEEZE64
@@ -224,2 +236,4 @@
     LUCID64) lucid amd64 ;;
+    MAVERICK32) maverick i386 ;;
+    MAVERICK64) maverick amd64 ;;
     SQUEEZE32) squeeze i386 ;;

You can download the patched file here

Create the ubuntu “basefile” (I want the 64-bit one):

sudo ./mk-basefile -J MAVERICK64

Add a section to /srv/fai/config/class/50-host-classes for our test Ubuntu installation:

--- 50-host-classes.orig      2011-11-09 14:16:09.000000000 -0800
+++ 50-host-classes           2011-11-09 14:14:15.000000000 -0800
@@ -31,2 +31,6 @@
        exit 0 ;; # CentOS/SLC does not use the GRUB class
+    ubuntu)
+        echo "FAIBASE UBUNTU"
+        ifclass I386 && echo "MAVERICK MAVERICK32"
+        ifclass AMD64 && echo "MAVERICK MAVERICK64" ;;
     *)

You can download the patched file here

Use the hostname you assigned earlier in /etc/hosts.

Next, we need to get the requisite apt files for the Ubuntu version we want to install. You are probably safest getting them from a live CD for the version of Ubuntu you want to install. You need secring.gpg, sources.list, trustdb.gpg, and trusted.gpg. You may want to modify sources.list to point at your favorite mirror (or a local mirror if you’ll be installing a lot of VMs). Here’s a snippet that will put these in the appropriate places in your FAI config:

for file in sources.list secring.gpg trustdb.gpg trusted.gpg; do sudo mkdir -p /srv/fai/config/files/etc/apt/${file}; sudo cp $file /srv/fai/config/files/etc/apt/${file}/MAVERICK; done

You’ll also need to create /srv/fai/config/files/etc/network/interfaces/UBUNTU:

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

We also have to configure the packages we’ll need to install. In /srv/fai/config/package_config/UBUNTU:

PACKAGES aptitude
apt
apt-utils
console-setup
debconf-utils
dhcp3-client
fai-client
grub
less
linux-image-generic
locales
openssh-server
vi

PACKAGES aptitude GRUB
grub lilo-

PACKAGES aptitude GRUB_PC
grub-pc grub- lilo-

PACKAGES aptitude LILO
lilo grub-

Just the basics, for now, we can add more packages later if we need them. The most important one here is the “linux-image-generic” package. We’ll also want to rename /srv/fai/config/package_config/DEFAULT to /srv/fai/config/package_config/DEBIAN. The “DEFAULT” class is applied to every FAI client, and since we’re going to be working with multiple distributions, we don’t want to use the bundled DEFAULT package_config file, which assumes a Debian client.

Finally, we need to create a hook for the updatebase step of the installation to copy the apt files into place inside of the target OS. The file should be /srv/fai/config/hooks/updatebase.UBUNTU:

#! /bin/bash
echo "Preparing apt for Ubuntu"
fcopy -v /etc/apt/secring.gpg
fcopy -v /etc/apt/sources.list
fcopy -v /etc/apt/trustdb.gpg
fcopy -v /etc/apt/trusted.gpg

fcopy is an FAI built-in that takes care of copying files from the configuration space to the target OS for us.

At this point, you should be able to create a new VM similar to the “pxetest” VM we created earlier, boot it, and watch FAI automagically install Ubuntu onto the new VM. When the install completes, a message is displayed telling you to hit Return to reboot. Before you do so you may want to run fai-chboot -d 192.168.0.10 (substituting the IP you used for the new VM) on the “faiserver”, and change the boot device priority, so that the VM will boot from the disk instead of the network. From here, you’ve got the basis of a pretty functional lab, and you can start experimenting with your FAI configuration.

In Part III of this series, I’ll show you how to use FAI to bootstrap Redhat, and also set up our PXE server to allow us to boot a “live” system for debugging. Redhat will be more of an adventure for me since I’m pretty unfamiliar with the RPM-based distributions.