code's life

one headache of using vagrant is to have base box, and creating basebox from scratch is headache, and how to solve it ?

You want to create by yourself for some framework, please wait for a minute, there already had one project veewee, and I don’t want to repeat the nice blog http://www.ducea.com/2011/08/15/building-vagrant-boxes-with-veewee/ as well.

Below just some tips when I tried this morning

veewee tips

veewee directory structure

I prefer to create one seperate veewee directory for this tasks.
iso files should be download in advance, and make a softlink under created directory iso.
then you can define your own basebox like below

~/veewee$ vagrant basebox define 'ubuntu1104' 'ubuntu-11.04-server-i386'

the directory will looks like below, you type command under veewee directory

~/veewee$ find
.
./definitions
./definitions/myubuntubox
./definitions/myubuntubox/postinstall.sh
./definitions/myubuntubox/preseed.cfg
./definitions/myubuntubox/definition.rb
./definitions/ubuntu1104
./definitions/ubuntu1104/postinstall.sh
./definitions/ubuntu1104/preseed.cfg
./definitions/ubuntu1104/definition.rb
./iso
./iso/ubuntu-11.04-server-i386.iso

virtualbox headless

suppose it should work headless (without GUI), while when I create basebox, it pops error on keyboard permisson, and when I enable my X11 display (since I tried it in my local linux server), it pops up virtualbox GUI and start to install.

it is excellent feeling when you see it is under auto-installtion.

configure apt proxy

since I try this in the company, I need to setup the proxy, it is fine to add the line export http_proxy=http://proxy:8080 in the beginning of postinstall.cfg, and it works fine.

look inside of veewee

the architecture of veewee looks great, it adds subcommand in vagrant, and all the majoy information are put into definition.rb

Veewee::Session.declare({
  :cpu_count => '1', :memory_size=> '384',
  :disk_size => '10140', :disk_format => 'VDI', :hostiocache => 'off',
   s_type_id => 'Ubuntu',
  :iso_file => "ubuntu-11.04-server-i386.iso",
  :iso_src => "http://releases.ubuntu.com/11.04/ubuntu-11.04-server-i386.iso",
  :iso_md5 => "ce1cee108de737d7492e37069eed538e",
  :iso_download_timeout => "1000",
  :boot_wait => "10", :boot_cmd_sequence => [
    '',
    '/install/vmlinuz noapic preseed/url=http://%IP%:%PORT%/preseed.cfg ',
    'debian-installer=en_US auto locale=en_US kbd-chooser/method=us ',
    'hostname=%NAME% ',
    'fb=false debconf/frontend=noninteractive ',
    'keyboard-configuration/layout=USA keyboard-configuration/variant=USA console-setup/ask_detect=false ',
    'initrd=/install/initrd.gz -- '
  ],
  :kickstart_port => "7122", :kickstart_timeout => "10000", :kickstart_file => "preseed.cfg",
  :ssh_login_timeout => "10000", :ssh_user => "vagrant", :ssh_password => "vagrant", :ssh_key => "",
  :ssh_host_port => "7222", :ssh_guest_port => "22",
  :sudo_cmd => "echo '%p'|sudo -S sh '%f'",
  :shutdown_cmd => "shutdown -P now",
  :postinstall_files => [ "postinstall.sh"], :postinstall_timeout => "10000"
})

it will be used during boot time to trigger the auto-installation, different os will use own auto-installation method, preseed.cfg is used for ubuntu/debian, if for suse then kickstart is used. postinstall.sh is used when the os is installed and rebooted.

summary

with those tool stacks (virtualbox,vagrant,puppet, veewee), your work makes more easily, don’t reinvent the wheel, don’t DIY. Use others brain.