BOSH Release for nfsclient

This is a workaround to be able to use bionic nfs services. The idea is use official distribuiton packages instead of shipping Debian packages with the release (which breaks the philosophy of a linux distribution and also the philosophy of Bosh)

For now it is focused on Ubuntu stemcells.

Usage

The parameters are compatible with the nfs_mounter job of bosh capi-release. It also creates the shared folder and the file <mountpoint>/shared/.nfs_test to check if it is writable (the file is used in other releases -like CAPI- for checking everything is ok).

Given this manifest:

---
name: nfs-test

releases:
- name: nfsclient
  version: latest

stemcells:
- alias: xenial
  os: ubuntu-xenial
  version: latest
- alias: bionic
  os: ubuntu-bionic
  version: latest

instance_groups:
- name: bionic
  instances: 1
  vm_type: small
  stemcell: bionic
  vm_extensions: []
  azs:
  - z1
  - z2
  - z3
  networks:
  - name: default
  jobs:
  - name: nfsclient
    release: nfsclient
    properties:
      nfs_server:
        address: "10.10.0.1"
        share: "/blobstore"
        share_path: '/var/vcap/data/nfs'
        nfsv4: false
        apt_packages:
        - rpcbind: "0.2.3-0.6"
        - keyutils: "*"
        - nfs-common: "1:1.3"

- name: xenial
  instances: 1
  vm_type: small
  stemcell: xenial
  vm_extensions: []
  azs:
  - z1
  - z2
  - z3
  networks:
  - name: default
  jobs:
  - name: nfsclient
    release: nfsclient
    properties:
      nfs_server:
        address: "10.10.0.1"
        share: "/blobstore"
        share_path: '/var/vcap/data/nfs'
        nfsv4: false
        
update:
  canaries: 1
  max_in_flight: 1
  serial: false
  canary_watch_time: 1000-60000
  update_watch_time: 1000-60000

Two vms will be created. The first one is using a ubuntu-bionic stemcell and the versions of the packages are specificed. The version of rpcbind matches a version so that one will be installed. In the case of nfs-common the version does not match a full version, but it matches with mayor versions (like 1:1.3.4-2.1ubuntu5.3 1:1.3.4-2.1ubuntu5.5 and 1:1.3.4-2.1ubuntu5) so the latest one (bigger) will be installed (1:1.3.4-2.1ubuntu5.5). Also both packages will will be marked for hold, so no updates will be installed even if they are available.

The xenial one (second instance) will have the nfs packages installed with the latest available version in the distribution (after doing apt-get update -by default-).

Developing

Blobs of this release are stored in this git repository in the folder blobstore. The idea was taken from here: https://starkandwayne.com/blog/bosh-releases-with-git-lfs/

After this, files created by bosh create-release --final can be committed to the repo with git commit and it will be stored with git lfs. No need run bosh sync-blobs, instead just git commit && git push. All of these steps are automatically done by the script create-final-public-release.sh.

When do a git commit, try to use good commit messages; the release changes on each release will be taken from the commit messages!

Creating Dev releases (for testing)

To create a dev release -for testing purposes-, just run:

# Create a dev release
bosh  create-release --force --tarball=/tmp/release.tgz
# Upload release to bosh director
bosh -e <bosh-env> upload-release /tmp/release.tgz

Then you can modify your manifest to include latest as a version (no url and sha fields are needed when the release is manually uploaded):

releases:
  [...]
- name: nfsclient
  version: latest

Once you know that the dev version is working, you can generate and publish a final version of the release (see below), and remember to change the deployment manifest to use a url of the new final manifest like this:

releases:
  [...]
- name: nfsclient
  url: https://github.com/SpringerPE/nfsclient-boshrelease/releases/download/v8/nfsclient-8.tgz
  version: 8
  sha1: 12c34892f5bc99491c310c8867b508f1bc12629c

or much better, use an operations file ;-)

Creating a new final release and publishing to GitHub releases:

Run: ./create-final-public-release.sh [version-number]

Keep in mind you will need a Github token defined in a environment variable GITHUB_TOKEN. Please get your token here: https://help.github.com/articles/creating-an-access-token-for-command-line-use/ and run export GITHUB_TOKEN="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx", after that you can use the script.

version-number is optional. If not provided it will create a new major version (as integer), otherwise you can specify versions like "8.1", "8.1.2". There is a regular expresion in the script to check if the format is correct. Bosh client does not allow you to create 2 releases with the same version number. If for some reason you need to recreate a release version, delete the file created in releases/nfsclient-boshrelease and update the index file in the same location, you also need to remove the release (and tags) in Github.

Usage in a deployment manifest

This is and add-on release, it will work only if it is deployed together with the prometheus-boshrelease on the nodes.

Considering v2 manifest style, add the new releases in the releases block:

releases:
  [...]
- name: nfsclient
  version: latest

then in your instance_groups, add:

instance_groups:
  [...]
  jobs:
  [...]
  - name: nfsclient
    release: nfsclient

Author

SpringerNature Platform Engineering, José Riguera López (jose.riguera@springer.com)

Copyright 2017 Springer Nature

License

Apache 2.0 License