jss-vagrant

This is a very basic Vagrant environment that helps you stand up an Ubuntu-based JSS server for test use with the Casper Suite. I built this for the purposes of being able to quickly set up and tear down a local JSS VM for an AutoPkg demo I did at the MacSysAdmin 2014 Conference. I had a need for being able to take a test setup around with me and wanted to be able to easily get it back to a known state, and didn't find the JSS Linux installer satisfactory.

It has been tested with the following Vagrant providers:

• virtualbox (default provider that ships with Vagrant)
• vmware_fusion (paid VMware provider from Hashicorp)
• digital_ocean

And has been tested with JSS versions 9.32 and 9.4. As I don't actually use the Casper Suite, I have no intention to continue testing later versions (see below, "Support").

The configuration is done with a single script, bootstrap.sh, which configures MySQL and Tomcat using the JSS webapp. The JSS is configured with a self-signed certificate, a more UNIX-like logging directory at /var/log/jss, at the default 8443 port.

The script has support for setting the JSS URL configuration, either manually via the script (which you would typically combine with an /etc/hosts entry), or automatically based on the IP address of the first network interface.

Setup

The only required steps are to copy a ROOT.war file extracted from the "JSS Manual Installation" package into the jss-app directory of this repo. Leave the name as-is.

Optionally:

• Copy a backup of a preconfigured JSS MySQL database to a file at data/jss_data.sql (see guidelines in bootstrap.sh for how to do this).
• Tweak any additional Tomcat and Java settings in the provided tomcat7-default and server.xml environment files.

Should you need it, the MySQL root user password is JAMF, and the credentials for the jamfsoftware database are the defaults: user jamfsoftware, password jamfsw03.

Typically for testing, your backup would contain enough configuration that you can immediately enroll test clients, have distribution point(s) configured, etc. You may wish to start a clean instance from this setup and then make backups as you build up a test environment. You can store different backups wherever you wish, but the only one that gets automatically restored to the server is the one named jss_data.sql.

Provisioning

Typically you would provision the instance only once (on initial up), or otherwise just destroy and rebuild the VM. The bootstrap.sh script was not written to be idempotent, but of course this could all be re-written with a proper configuration management provisioner.

Support

I don't have plans to continue any development for this setup, as I am not using Casper in production. Hopefully, some others who administrate and test the Casper Suite might find this repo helpful.