This week in lab machine deployment
to : Greg Newton
Minutes: 2160
Most of my time has been working on setting up a deployment of the latest LTS version of the OS on lab machines.
Changes to the underlying OS mean that using the netboot+PXE method is no longer viable. Ubuntu does not support the ‘mini.iso’ anymore, but points to other deployment methods like MAAS. I looked in to MAAS, as well as FAI, Cubic, Ubuntu from Scratch, and using Ubuntu Core Desktop.
None of the above options look like a good fit, but should probably all be re-evaluated later - especially MAAS with Core Desktop.
I’ve made the decision that for this iteration I’ll use a manually set-up machine as a base and then use Clonezilla+Clonezilla Server to deploy the machines individually. I don’t like this, but the option is to deploy the entire Ubunutu ISO and post-install script all th rest.
I will continue to build the few Debian packages that I’ve been building for years - they make installation much more reliable. I’m moving to Temurin JDK though as Oxygen is using it. It requires a separate installation of javafx though.
Speaking of Oxygen, the licensing has changed, such that the lab will need to use floating licenses for the machines. Unfortunately this also means that we’ll need to run a license server. I’m not sure how or where to run that yet.
To manually create an image for the lab it makes sense to use virtual machines. Unfortunately we are no longer allowed to use VirtualBox (thanks Oracle!), so I went through the motions of trying Gnome Boxes and VMWare. Boxes just didn’t work (“No KVM” error), but it’s a very simple VM manager. VMWare Player now allows you to create VMs but it (VMWare, not the VMs) causes havoc on my machine - I think due to the numerous virtual network devices that it creates. I lost network connectivity on the host AND the VMs, and my host desktop environment froze more than once. So, VMWare Player has left the chat.
I settled on the very retro, very clunky-looking virt-manager. It works very well, but don’t use UEFI! It even provides snapshot-ing.
Also started working through the various issues that have arisen with the in-house packages like auth, conf, style, and desktop. These are mostly meta-installers that include specific configs so they won’pose a huge problem. Style, in particular, can probably be dropped, or incorporated in to another package - especially if the final theme is anything like we have in the alpha (although I do not hold my breath for this).
Also edited the HCMC landing page to include a link to Teams.