orca-tamer

The orca tamer is a gentoo penguin from the clan of the warrior penguins. Even in the eye of danger he persists until finally forging an allegiance with local researchers on the lookout thus saving himself from the maddingly vast hordes of hungry orcas.

When the orca tamer got into GNU/Linux he decided that he needed a stable(ish) base setup based upon the foundations of Gentoo Linux but with added binary packaging and tools for automating all the things.

At the moment orca tamer can start to get you developing puppet manifests for gentoo in a short time. For now this only has 64bit support.

Some binary packages are already available for the system. Please consider those proof of concept only, I will stop offering those until orca tamer has stabilzed soon(ish).

This needs heaps of work, please create issues and send pull requests. You can also use the github comment feature if you don't grok a commit of mine, I'll be happy to clarify and document where there are issues.

Lifecycle of a Box

• box gets built from stage3 with veewee using binary packages
• box gets exported as vagrant box
• box gets imported in vagrant
• box is used to provision a complete environment using vagrant
• provisioned environment is used to build binary packages and stage3 boxes

Available Boxes

Machine	IP (vbox internal network)	exposed ports	description
puppet	10.30.0.10	8080 -> puppetboard	Primary puppet master. Must always run first since it is used to bootstrap the remaining machines.
binhost	10.30.0.20		Bare Linux install with the ::profile::system profile.
logstash	10.30.0.30	8081 -> logstash, 9200 -> elasticsearch	Central logfile aggregation and parsing, made awesome with logstash and syslog-ng.

Quickstart

Given you already have a working vagrant/virtualbox install. This should work.

git clone https://github.com/purplehazech/purplehazech-orcatamer.git
cd purplehazech-orcatamer
vagrant up puppet

You now have a running puppet master instance with puppetdb and puppetboard set to go. The puppetboard instance should be available at http://localhost:8080 at this point.

You can now start your first puppet agent based machine.

vagrant up binhost

At some point vagrant will say Running provisioner: puppet_server... and you get to wait until puppet has run on the machine so you can inspect the results in puppetboard.

Binhost ist an empty machine that gets installed with binary packages.

Install

You need to install some prerequisite tools to start use

virtualbox

For the moment this runs on virtualbox. I plan on adding support for other clouds later.

vagrant

I use a vagrant install from http://vagrantup.com

veewee

Veewee is used to build from stage3/portage-snapshot to a vagrant box.

# install veewee
rvm 2.1.0 exec bundle install
# call veewee like so after install (create an alias)
rvm 2.1.0 exec bundle exec veewee

vagrant usage

After building and exporting a veewee box you can add it to vagrant and use it to provision a puppet master.

vagrant box add orcatamer orcatamer.box
vagrant up puppet

If you want to install the full environment run vagrant up without a box argument to start all the configured boxes.

veewee usage

You can use veewee to build base boxes. This repo contains a definition for a gentoo box based on the specs that most of my machines will have.

veewee vbox build  'orcatamer'
veewee vbox export 'orcatamer'

Due to issues with Virtualbox < 4.3.10 you might have to explicitly enable HVP on the box for it to boot without a kernel panic.

VBoxManage setextradata orcatamer VBoxInternal/CPUM/EnableHVP 1

This is described in https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12748.

cleanup

# remove virtual machine built by veewee
veewee vbox remove orcatamer
# remove all miachines deployed by vagrant
vagrant destroy
# remove base box from vagrant
vagrant box remove orcatamer

usage

You now have a fully puppetized gentoo latest box that is configured for building binary packages. The packages built within are stored in vagrant/packages so they stay available after the box has been destroyed and on subsequent rebuilds.

todo

• install librarian-puppet during veewee phase (see shell/bootstrap.sh)
• switch logger to syslog-ng from metalog during veewee phase (see manifests/default.pp)
• vixie cron support in syslogng puppet module
• local Veeveefile and templates
• inject /etc/puppet/hiera.yaml with vagrant
• refactor docs to make veewee less important
• split manifests/{profile,role} into their own modules
• find a way to force build on missing binpkg
• create veewee machine
• manage /etc/hosts and switch to hostnames where ips are in use (only in ::profile afaik)
• refactor veewee build to install puppet right away and only use puppet thereafter
• use @unavailable-binaries buil unbuilt packages (see #1)
• replace virtualbox dependency with a real type 1 hypervisor (ie. refactor my dev laptop heavily)