CentOS 8 Packer Template for MAAS

Introduction

The Packer template in this directory creates a CentOS 8 AMD64 image for use with MAAS.

Prerequisites (to create the image)

• A machine running Ubuntu 18.04+ with the ability to run KVM virtual machines.
• qemu-utils, libnbd-bin, nbdkit and fuse2fs
• Packer., v1.7.0 or newer

Requirements (to deploy the image)

• MAAS 2.3+, MAAS 2.7+ recommended
• Curtin 19.3-792+

Default user

The default username is cloud-user

Customizing the Image

The deployment image may be customized by modifying http/centos8.ks. See the CentOS kickstart documentation for more information.

Building the image using a proxy

The Packer template downloads the CentOS net installer from the Internet. To tell Packer to use a proxy set the HTTP_PROXY environment variable to your proxy server. Alternatively you may redefine iso_url to a local file, set iso_checksum_type to none to disable checksuming, and remove iso_checksum_url.

To use a proxy during the installation define the KS_PROXY variable in the environment, as bellow:

export KS_PROXY="--proxy=\"${HTTP_PROXY}\""

Building an image

You can easily build the image using the Makefile:

make

Alternatively you can manually run packer. Your current working directory must be in packer-maas/centos8, where this file is located. Once in packer-maas/centos8 you can generate an image with:

packer init
PACKER_LOG=1 packer build .

Note: centos8.pkr.hcl is configured to run Packer in headless mode. Only Packer output will be seen. If you wish to see the installation output connect to the VNC port given in the Packer output or change the value of headless to false in centos8.pkr.hcl.

Installation is non-interactive.

Uploading an image to MAAS

maas $PROFILE boot-resources create \
    name='centos/8-custom' title='CentOS 8 Custom' \
    architecture='amd64/generic' filetype='tgz' \
    content@=centos8.tar.gz

Default Username

The default username is cloud-user