IaC In Practice

This is a record the experiments I've been carrying out at home.

Physical Set-up

I bought some reconditioned equipment from eBay:

• • 4x Dell-PowerEdge-SC1425-Dual-Xeon-2x2-8Ghz-64-Bit-6GB-RAM-SATA-Server-1U-Rackmount

  • D-Link DES 1016D 16 port 10/100 ethernet switch

  • Solwise 85Mbps HomePlug Turbo Ethernet Single Adapter

I put all of these out in the garage, as they are bit noisy for the house(The HomePlug is great for this kind of thing) .

I connected the HomePlug to the management NIC of the primary rack server. This would allow me to turn it on and off from my laptop using IpmiUtils.

Roles of the Primary Server:

• • A network gateway/router;

  • DHCP and TFTP servers; to support PXE boot of other servers.

  • Bootstrap and Control apps and services

Bootstrapping the primary server

I'd like to use PXE to install the primary server from my Windows laptop, so I installed:

• • OpenDHCP

  • OpenTFTP

Unfortunately the primary server gets it's IP from the DHCP service on my ADSL router. For PXE to work, it needs to use the DHCP service running on the laptop. Not the most elegant solution, but if I give my laptop a permanent IP lease and then disable DHCP on the ADSL router, the Laptop becomes the default DHCP server (using non-overlapping address ranges).

NOTE TO SELF: remember to re-enable DHCP on ADSL Router :-)

Create a kickstart file for Ubuntu

• • Download 64bit Ubuntu Server v12.10 ISO image.

  • Install it on VirtualBox VM (for some reason 64bit Ubuntu on VirtualBox goes very slowly on my Intel i7 laptop)

  • Create a kickstart file.