HOWTO.md

Overview

Both approaches outlined below will retrieve a minimal Ubuntu box and provision it utilizing the bootstrap-bce.sh script. The BCE_PROVISION environment variable serves as a hint to the bootstrap script so that different authors can create different VMs using the same build framework.

Note that to create a VM for VirtualBox, you'll need a recent version of VirtualBox (in particular the default version on Ubuntu 12.04 is too old - you'll need to install the Ubuntu virtualbox-4.3 package).

Requirements

• Packer - installation instructions are at https://www.packer.io/intro/getting-started/setup.html

• Caches of python, R, and other packages are maintained in the BCE box.com account. These may be needed if the online sources are removed.

• 2015-spring

Creating BCE VMs with Packer

For a Virtualbox VM, run:

$ make vbox

This creates a virtual machine in the OVA format that can be imported into Virtualbox on Windows, Mac, or UNIX.

To create an Amazon EC2 AMI, set your Amazon security credentials and then run:

$ make ec2

or for an AMI that will work with cfncluster:

$ make ec2-cfn

Note that the CFN build requests a volume size of 15 Gb or it runs out of disk building the AMI; this 15 Gb then gets baked in as the default when using the AMI to start an instance.

Amazon credentials can be set on the command line or by editing the BCE json file. To set on the command line run:

$ export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=YYY
$ export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=ZZZ

More information on building to ec2 is available on the packer ec2 help page

Notes on provisioning

Regarding guest additions, it should be possible to attach the bundled ISO using something like the following in the JSON "vboxmanage" section:

[
  "storageattach",   "{{.Name}}",
  "--storagectl",    "IDE Controller",
  "--port",          "1",
  "--device",        "0",
  "--type",          "dvddrive",
  "--medium",        "additions"
]

For which you should also switch "guest_additions_mode" to "disable."

However Dav reported the error:

VBoxManage: error: Invalid UUID or filename "additions"

Strangely, this does work if he executes it during provisioning:

vboxmanage storageattach "BCE-xubuntu-14.04-amd64" --storagectl "IDE Controller" --port 1 --device 0 --type dvddrive --medium additions

Go figure