Foreman Discovery Image for ARMv7

Development
1

At work, I took on a project that will have me deploying around 80 or so
iperf test boxes around to our customers. I've been wanting to learn
Foreman for some time now so I started down that path. I quickly learned
that the devices that were chosen for me (Odroid xu4 and Banana Pro) don't
have PXE capabilities (to my knowledge). It was suggested for me to look at
the Foreman Discovery Image, but I soon realized that it will not run on
these devices that I were purchased for the project.

I was talking with some folks on Foreman's IRC room about what it might
take to make this happen and it was suggested that I email this list about
it. Would it be as simple as me taking the Centos 7 image for the Banana
Pro and merging the files from Github
(https://github.com/theforeman/foreman-discovery-image/) ?

Any pointers would be appreciated. I just want to move along and try to get
this working before it's time to just deploy these things by hand or
writing some custom scripts to accomplish a deployment.

Thanks!

2

> I was talking with some folks on Foreman's IRC room about what it might
> take to make this happen and it was suggested that I email this list about
> it. Would it be as simple as me taking the Centos 7 image for the Banana
> Pro and merging the files from Github
> (https://github.com/theforeman/foreman-discovery-image/) ?

Well, no. :slight_smile:

ARM boards do not have BIOS, there is no such thing like PXE booting.
But you can indeed inject discovery services into the images. CentOS
project provides few of them:

http://mirror.centos.org/altarch/7/isos/armhfp/

You'd need to extract it, put discovery services in it and configure it.
Our configuration is done in kickstart snippets, you'd need to extract
that out.

The question is what you want to do after discovery is booted, it only
reports and reboots into PXE which is irrelevant. You need image-based
provisioning, we have a pending patch which is WIP. Feel free to take a
look on it.

ยทยทยท -- Later, Lukas #lzap Zapletal