Crowbar, a great cloud unboxer, is currently evolving at a rapid pace, if you want to see the latest and greatest thing without waiting any longer, you can build your own Crowbar ISO. In this article we’ll show you how to do just that using the Roxy branch which is supposed to support OpenStack Havanna. We will suppose you aren’t planning to contribute to the code, so we won’t use our any personalized Git repository. If you don’t know what’s Crowbar, it’s platform for server provisioning and deployment from bare metal. But if you want to see how it could be used to deploy OpenStack, read our previous article.
This article is based on the offical documentation from the Crowbar team plus some tips & tricks.
Build Machine
Let’s first install all the prerequisites on our build machine.
You first need a fresh Ubuntu 12.04.02 OS installed.
SSH to that box and follow the steps below.
Make sure to enable password-less sudo:
sudo sed -ie "s/%sudo\tALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL/%sudo ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL/g" /etc/sudoers
Note: This is required because the build process will mount ISO which require root access but you don’t want to stay close to the installation to enter it when required.
Install required package with
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install \
git rpm ruby rubygems1.9 curl build-essential debootstrap \
mkisofs binutils markdown erlang debhelper python-pip \
build-essential libssl-dev zlib1g-dev \
libpq-dev byobu cabextract ruby1.9.1-dev
If you plan to install the lastest developement branch also install
sudo apt-get install libsqlite-dev libsqlite-dev libsqlite-dev
Now make sure you use the latest Ruby (1.9.1) version with
sudo update-alternatives --config ruby
PostgreSQL 9.3 installation
Crowbar is now using PostgreSQL 9.3 which isn’t part of Ubuntu 12.04 so you need to remove the older Ubuntu version
sudo apt-get remove postgresql
Add a new repository key
wget --quiet -O - http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/ACCC4CF8.asc | sudo apt-key add -
determine your OS codename
lsb_release -c
Create the following file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list with the following content and update apt database
deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/ <codename>-pgdg main
Now you can run
apt-get update
Note: The codename should be the one from the previous command.
Intall the newer version from this new repository
sudo apt-get install postgresql-9.3 pgadmin3
Configure PostgreSQL
sudo vi /etc/postgresql/9.3/main/pg_hba.conf
Add the following section at the beginning of the following file /etc/postgresql/9.3/main/pg_hba.conf
local all all trust
And change Port like this in /etc/postgresql/9.3/main/postgresql.conf
port = 5439
Start the service
sudo service postgresql restart
Now create a Crowbar user
sudo createuser -s -d -U postgres -p 5439 crowbar
Test PostgreSQL installation
psql postgresql://crowbar@:5439/template1 -c 'select true;'
Gems installation
Install required Gems
sudo gem install builder bluecloth
sudo gem install json net-http-digest_auth kwalify bundler delayed_job delayed_job_active_record rake rspec pg --no-ri --no-rdoc
sudo gem install rcov -v 0.9.11 --no-ri --no-rdoc
Ubuntu 12.04 ISO
Create repository for Ubuntu ISO
mkdir -p ~/.crowbar-build-cache/iso
cd ~/.crowbar-build-cache/iso
You now have to download Ubuntu-12.04-server ISO to it
wget http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/12.04.0/ubuntu-12.04.2-server-amd64.iso
Crowbar repository
You currently have all the pre-requisites to start the building process. The first step is to clone the Crowbar Git Repository
cd ~
git clone https://github.com/crowbar/crowbar.git
cd ~/crowbar
Now do the following, make sure you append --no-github if you don’t want to submit any pull-requests
./dev setup --no-github
./dev fetch --no-github
Build Sledgehammer ISO
Sledgehammer is a bare OS by default based on CentOS 6.2 used to bootstrap Nodes during the discovery process, build it once with
cd ~/crowbar
sudo ./build_sledgehammer.sh
It takes some time but you won’t have to repeat this process for each Crowbar ISO Build fortunately. It should terminate with the following message:
Your pxeboot image is complete.
Copy tftpboot/ subdirectory to /tftpboot or a subdirectory of /tftpboot.
Set up your DHCP, TFTP and PXE server to serve /tftpboot/.../pxeboot.0
Note: The initrd image contains the whole CD ISO and is consequently
very large. You will notice when pxebooting that initrd can take a
long time to download. This is normal behaviour.
Configure Crowbar builder
Almost there, now list the different release available to you
./dev releases
Show all the builds
./dev builds
Select what you want to build for example
./dev switch development/master
Display your current release and build
./dev release
./dev build
As of now mesa-1.6/openstack-os-build is the most stable OpenStack release based on 1.6 (mesa). The current Crowbar 2.0 branch (master) doesn’t support OpenStack yet.
Building
If you’re using a Cloud hosted VM to build Crowbar, I would recommend to start Byobu like that :
byobu
In case you are disconnected from it, building will still continue, and you’ll be able to reconnect to it once being reconnected to your instance.
Now for fun let’s build roxy/openstack-os-build which was introduced to support Havana, Pebbles is the previous one which support Grizzly. So we do:
./dev switch roxy/openstack-os-build
./dev build --os ubuntu-12.04 --update-cache
If you can strange README.empty-branch files, you can run the following command to solve that problem
cd ~/crowbar/barclamps
for bc in *; do (cd "$bc"; git clean -f -x -d 1>/dev/null 2>&1; git reset --hard 1>/dev/null 2>&1); done
You now have to be really patient, building Crowbar is a long process, lots of things to download, it took me around 80 minutes, so you can detach from the Byobu session using F6 and do other stuff. When you’ll come back in your builder node, you’ll see what’s going on and if you’re lucky it will be done with the following message.
2013-11-02 17:04:54 -0700: Copying over Sledgehammer bits
2013-11-02 17:04:55 -0700: Creating new ISO
2013-11-02 17:05:51 -0700: Image at /home/user/crowbar/crowbar-roxy_openstack-os-build.4700.dev-ubuntu-12.04.iso
2013-11-02 17:05:51 -0700: Finished.
You can now transfer around the ISO to boot a Crowbar admin node
scp user@crowbar-builder:/home/user/crowbar/crowbar-roxy_openstack-os-build.4546.dev-ubuntu-12.04.iso .
It’s a 2Gb transfer so if it fails you can resume it with
rsync --partial --progress --rsh=user@crowbar-builder:/home/user/crowbar/crowbar-roxy_openstack-os-build.4546.dev-ubuntu-12.04.iso .
Or you can also publish the crowbar directory over HTTP using Ruby like this
ruby -run -e httpd -- -p 3333 ~/crowbar
Now connect to your client machine and download it with
wget http://crowbar-builder.lab.int:3333/crowbar-roxy_openstack-os-build.4734.dev-ubuntu-12.04.iso
If the transfert fails you can resume it using the -c wget option
wget -c http://crowbar-builder.lab.int:3333/crowbar-roxy_openstack-os-build.4734.dev-ubuntu-12.04.iso
Knife Configuration
Current Crowbar Roxy version embbed Chef Server v10.18.2.
You can interact with the Chef API using the Knife command line interface, but your first have to create an admin user from Chef Web UI accesible at http://crowbar.lab.int:4040.
It will give you a private key that you have to save to ~/.chef/admin.pem.
You’ll also need to copy the /etc/chef/validation.pem from the crowbar admin to ~/.chef/validation.pem on your client node.
Now, to create a ~/.chef/knife.rb configuration file, use the following command:
knife configure -i \
-u <user> \
-s https://chef-server.lab.int:443 \
-r /home/<user>/chef-repo \
--admin-client-name admin \
--admin-client-key ~/.chef/admin.pem \
--validation-key ~/.chef/validation.pem \
--validation-client-name chef-validator
-u new API user to create
-s API endpoint
-r The path to your chef-repo
--admin-client-name existing API user
--admin-client-key existing user private key
--validation-client-name The existing validation clientname
Building a Crowbar OpenStack Image
If you plan to deploy a Crowbar Admin node within an OpenStack cloud, you first need to generate a QCOW image. Install the some required tools
sudo apt-get install kvm-qemu
pip install python-glanceclient
Now generate a Raw disk
kvm-img create -f raw crowbar.img G9
Now you can install Crowbar within this image
sudo kvm -m 1024 -cdrom crowbar-roxy_openstack-os-build.4700.dev-ubuntu-12.04.iso \
-drive file=crowbar.img,if=virtio,index=0\
-boot d -net nic -net user -nographic -vnc :0 \
-usbdevice tablet
To look at the installation of Crowbar connect to your node IP using VNC and wait until it terminate. I still have to debug the last message saying no root partition.
Notes
Compared to the official docs, here is what what necessary on Ubuntu 12.04
libopenssl-ruby1.9wasn’t found so I bypassed the installation of this package.ruby1.9.3-devno gems with this name but documentation says it’s ok on Ubuntu12.04, we installed instead ruby1.9.1-dev which is required by json gem.gem install pgrequire installation of libpq-dev Ubuntu package, or postgresql-devel on Redhatgem install rcov -v 0.9.11Necessary to force version here because 1.0 isn’t supported on current Ruby 1.9sudo apt-get install cabextractwas necessary or build would fail.~/.crowbar-build-cache/barclamps/dell_raid/files/dell_raid/toolsd/l file below inside that directorywget http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public/MegaRAID%20Common%20Files/8.07.07_MegaCLI.zipwget http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public/Host%20Bus%20Adapters/Host%20Bus%20Adapters%20Common%20Files/SAS_SATA_6G_P16/SAS2IRCU_P16.zip
- sometimes the provisionning steps enters an infinite loop with message saying
waiting for pxe file to contain: .*_install .....to exit the loop just run chef-client on the admin node or restart the tftpd process. - When I applied first the Nova barclamp, it failed I had to manually start OpenvSwitch like this
start openvswitch-switchand re-run chef-client on the node. - Roxy already support Docker, see docs for details.
Conclusion
It’s great to be able to build your own custom Crowbar ISO, you can then follow the development as it happens. Once you boot a Node using your shiny new ISO that you just built, login/password is crowbar/crowbar. You can then run the following command to install your crowbar admin node, but you should review our previous article before going any further.
sudo /tftpboot/ubuntu_dvd/extra/install <NODE_FQDN>
It’s then detached from the terminal, so to track the progress run
sudo screen -r -S crowbar-install
You can also look at
tail -f /var/log/install.log
Once the Admin is ready, boot other node and start applying proposals from Crowbar WebUI
http://10.124.0.10:3000
or like this from the command line
/opt/dell/bin/crowbar machines allocate d00-0c-29-fd-1a-31.lab.int
/opt/dell/bin/crowbar mysql proposal create proposal
/opt/dell/bin/crowbar mysql proposal show proposal > mysql.json
edit the json file (put the host in the appropriate elements element)
...
"elements": {
"mysql-server": [
"d00-0c-29-fd-1a-31.lab.int"
]
...
Save it
/opt/dell/bin/crowbar mysql proposal edit proposal --file mysql.json
/opt/dell/bin/crowbar mysql proposal commit proposal
Do the same for other proposals: keystone, glance, cinder, neutron, nova, nova_dashboard.
Watch proposal deployment progress
tail -f /var/log/syslog
You can start over with
./destroy_cluster.sh
For more details consult our previous article
Being near trunk, there is a a non null probability that the installation can fails, so consult /var/log/crowbar/install to troubleshoot. If the first install-chef.sh failed to avoid a current bug in the Roxy release, re-provision your Admin node from your ISO, re-running the install-chef command will bring strange errors with deb-deb-deb and rack.rb not found !!!
Crowbar Admin node IP address is static and will be set to 192.168.124.10. So If it worked you should then be abble to access crowbar web interface at http://192.168.124.10:3000.