Status: DO NOT USE. In transition.

Work items:

1. Stop using Ansible and start using Go language with templating instead.
2. Update due to lots of changes in the coreos-baremetal project.
3. Update because the iPXE driver for VirtualBox is now too large (see repo virtualbox-ipxe)

Network booting CoreOS to bare metal machines

This project uses two excellent projects: dnsmasq and coreos-baremetal. Both of these work on either Linux or OS X.

This guide details how to set up an "environment", which is a cluster of CoreOS bare metal servers. Ansible playbooks are provided to automate the setup and operation.

Testing have been done using OS X as the boot server, and VirtualBox virtual machines and real machines as the booted machines.

Initial setup

See Initial Setup document.

Create an environment

To create an environment, pick a name that's unique in your repository. For this example let's call it vbox. The environment represents a CoreOS cluster of bare metal machines, which share an SSH key and a configuration.

ansible-playbook -e env=vbox -i hosts make-environment.yaml will create your environment for you, including a new SSH keypair vbox-key and vbox-key.pub. This keypair is saved in your ~/.ssh directory, and also copied to your environment's secret-files and public-files directories.

Once your environment is set up, change to its directory, for example, cd vbox.

Sharing an environment

If you wish to share your environment, configurations, and secrets with others, create a fork of the repo. Do your setup, then encrypt your secrets and push the results to your fork on GitHub. Another team member can clone your repo and add the environment's password, then decrypt the secrets. See Sharing Secrets for more information.

Configure your environment

Change to your environment directory, and edit the file group_vars/local/coreos.yaml. Set the variables according to your local configuration as follows:

Variable	Value	Default
boot_server_ip	IP address of boot server	10.2.0.200
boot_server_ip_base	Base IP address of local network	10.2.0.0
boot_server_ip_netmask	Netmask for local network	255.255.255.0
coreos_channel	CoreOS release channel (alpha, beta, stable)	alpha
coreos_release	CoreOS specific release e.g. 935.0.0	current

Setting coreos_release to "current" will fetch the latest release for that release channel.

Then, run ansible_playbook ../make_cbm.yaml to configure your environment and download the necessary binaries. If anything changes, rerun the playbook to reconfigure the environment.

Start the boot services

Set the environment variable CBM to the path for the cbm directory for your environment. For example:

export CBM=~/src/coreos-pxe-install/vbox/cbm

OS X

Start the coreos-baremetal service:

cd $CBM
./bootcfg --address=0.0.0.0:8080

In another terminal window, start the dnsmasq service:

cd $CBM
sudo ./dnsmasq -C dnsmasq.data/dnsmasq.conf -k --log-facility=- --log-dhcp

dnsmasq must run as root because it opens privileged ports to listen for DHCP and TFTP requests from the PXE booted servers. You must enter your OS X password.

Boot your booted machine for the first time

Power on the booted machine. For first time use, you may want to attach a keyboard and display for debugging purposes. You should see CoreOS boot up with the hostname set to default. If you have a keyboard/display attached, CoreOS will automatically login the core user.

SSH into the machine. Commands to use:

• ip addr - discover IP addresses and MAC addresses.
• lsblk - discover disks.

Troubleshooting

The most common cause of network boot failure is incorrect BIOS configuration on the booted server.

Note the server MAC address

The window running dnsmasq will have a message similar to:

dnsmasq-dhcp[8655]: PXE(en0) 90:2b:34:14:f6:6a proxy

Make a note of the MAC address of your booted machine, in this example it is 90:2b:34:14:f6:6a