bootmachine overview and usage

The bootmachine-admin start command simply copies two files to the current working directory. A standard Fabric fabfile.py and a settings.py for which you need to customize. Additionally it copies over the configuration folder containing the initial states/recipes to configure the servers.

After customizing your settings, all it takes to convert bare metal servers from aluminium into rhodium is one simple Fabric command:

$ fab bootmachine

Internally this does two things. First provider.bootem checks if there are any non-booted servers listed in the settings.PROVIDER_BACKENDS. If provider.boot finds a non-booted server, it will boot it in parallel. In the meantime provider.bootem queries the provider to ensure that all servers are ACTIVE before continuing.

Second, after all servers are found to be active, the bootstrap method is called to check if there are any servers which have not yet been bootstrapped. These servers are then bootstrapped in parallel.

Note

These commands can also be run separately:

$ fab boot
$ fab each bootstrap_distro
$ fab each bootstrap_configurator
$ fab master configure

After provisioning is complete you can manually login, with the user credentials and port as defined in your settings.py, to the machine using the following format:

$ ssh -p {port} {username}@{ip}

To list the details for your new machines, including ip addresses:

$ fab provider

Or if you already have openstack-compute or python-novaclient installed, you could just as easily:

$ openstack-compute list
     or
$ nova list

All available commands can be seen by typing:

$ fab -l  # which is short for fab --list