How to use Cloud-init User-data in Foreman (PXE)

FF133 · October 15, 2021, 7:35am

Problem:
Not able to access <foreman_url>/userdata/
Should the plugin (foreman_userdata ) be installed?

Foreman and Proxy versions:
Foreman 2.3

FF133 · October 15, 2021, 7:42am

Trying to boot physical live server - all I need is for TheForeman to host the userdata-directory making it reachable using NoCloud in Grub option.

lzap · October 15, 2021, 10:58am

Userdata plugin has been merged into Foreman in 1.23. So 1.24 and then 2.0+ already contain it.

What do you mean by “not able to access”. Only hosts with (remote) IP that is in Foreman inventory will see some result, otherwise it is HTTP 404.

Example: Create a host with IP 1.2.3.4 and then ssh to 1.2.3.4 and curl from there. Do not use NAT.

lzap · October 15, 2021, 10:59am

Also that blogpost is old, use:

https://docs.theforeman.org/nightly/Provisioning_Guide/index-foreman-el.html#Provisioning_Virtual_Machines_in_VMware_vSphere-Provisioning_with_cloudinit_and_userdata_templates

FF133 · October 15, 2021, 12:26pm

Aha… Does this mean that the Foreman server must be the DHCP / knowing the IP of the host machine?
All I want is to use something like <%= foreman-url(cloud-init) %> or atleast host the foreman_url/userdata.

FF133 · October 15, 2021, 12:28pm

Reason I can not use this is because this solution expects the file:///etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/example_cloud-init_config.cfg being present on a VMware Template, but I have PXE live server.

FF133 · October 18, 2021, 7:39am

Alright, so in order to use cloud-init (user-data files) Foreman assumes the IP-address is present in the host nic-entry. This is not desired/possible in my case.

FF133 · October 21, 2021, 12:55pm

Since canonical is pushing towards cloud-init (user-data & meta-data), why not create an options which not require IP-address of the client? Couldn’t it be possible to use token the same way as with preseed-files? E.g

<foreman_url>/userdata/user-data/?token=client1
<foreman_url>/userdata/user-data/?token=client2.

Creating a temporary userdata-directory for each host?..

lzap · October 25, 2021, 9:29am

How would you do that? Each Foreman host has a different and unique UUID token, but for this workflow you need to create a common image with the example_cloud_init_config.cfg NoCloud cloud init configuration. I don’t see a way to do this.

FF133 · October 25, 2021, 9:59am

For preseeds Foreman generates a unique UUID token for each host, why wouldn’t this be possible for cloud-init directories? (Maybe hacky idk)
E.g. having a PXEgrub:

linux /boot/vmlinuz ds=nocloud-net\;s=http://<%= foreman_server_fqdn %>/userdata/?token=XXXX
initrd /boot/initrd

My issue is that I’m PXE metal/physical hosts using external DHCP.

lzap · October 25, 2021, 11:27am

I am not sure what you are doing, but cloud-init is useful when you are spawning VMs or cloud instances from images. If you are doing PXE, there is no need for cloud-init.

FF133 · October 25, 2021, 11:43am

As I mentioned earlier; Canonical is pushing towards cloud-init (moving away from netboot image) with the new server installer (subiquity), so if I want to auto-install a Ubuntu 21.04 client I need to use the Ubuntu 21.04 live server iso w/ cloud-init integrated.

Does this clear things up_?

lzap · October 25, 2021, 12:40pm

You mean this?

Token support for cloud-init should not be hard to implement, yeah. We can probably add it to the current sprint.

Created: Feature #33774: Add cloud-init support for tokens - Foreman