ttylinux has a very small disk and memory footprint, and very quick boot time. This packer template uses the smallest of the ttylinux family, PC-i486. The ttylinux iso is a live image, booted with dhcp enabled and the provisioner installs onto the given virtual disk.
The install.sh script does the following:
-
Creates a disk partition
-
Extracts the embedded install.conf
-
Runs /sbin/ttylinux-installer
The install.conf is based on the example that comes with ttylinux
Originally from: http://ttylinux.net/Download/ttylinux-pc_i486-16.1.iso.gz
However:
-
pc_i486-16.1 was deleted from the site when pc_i486-16.2 was released and the pc_i486-16.2 installer doesn't work
-
packer would need to unzip the iso.gz
This can be done via the console or kickstart with:
vim-cmd hostsvc/enable_ssh
vim-cmd hostsvc/start_ssh
Any ports that packer needs must be open, such as:
-
incoming
vnc_port_min..vnc_port_max -
outgoing ports for iso file downloads
-
outgoing
http_port_min..http_port_max
Use 'esxcli network firewall' to configure rules on an existing system and/or via kickstart.
This setting enables an io filter in the vmkernel to look for ARP responses where it can get the ip address for a VM without VMware tools being installed.
esxcli system settings advanced set -o /Net/GuestIPHack -i 1
Note when building most images, an ARP request happens when the kickstart or preseed file is downloaded from packer's HTTP server. This is not the case with ttylinux, so the boot_command works around this by running an nslookup in the live image.
-
remote_type - esx5
-
remote_host - hostname or ip address of the ESX machine
-
remote_port - ssh port on the ESX machine, defaults to 22
-
remote_username - ssh user on the ESX machine
-
remote_password - ssh user on the ESX machine
-
remote_datastore - vmfs volume, "datastore1" for example
-
disk_type_id - vmkfstools diskformat param, "thin" or "sesparse" for example
-
vmx_data.ethernet0.networkName - "VM Network" for example
Example:
packer build -var remote_host=10.118.67.109 template.json