Home Notes Popular RSS

March 11, 2017

Deploying FreeBSD on Linode unattended in minutes

freebsdlinodevps

I became a FreeBSD user over 2 years ago when I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I swapped my y410p dual-booting Windows / Ubuntu with FreeBSD running Gnome 3. I learned a lot during the transition and came to appreciate FreeBSD as a user. I soon began running FreeBSD as my OS of choice on cloud servers I managed. So naturally, when I started working at Linode a year ago I wanted to run FreeBSD servers on Linode too.

Linode is a great platform for running random unofficial images because you have much control over the configuration. I followed existing guides closely and was soon able to get a number of operating systems running on Linodes by installing them manually: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Minix3, and SmartOS to date.

Unofficial images come at a cost though. In particular, I became frustrated having to reinstall using the installer every time I managed to trash the disk. So over the past year, I spent time trying to understand the automated installation processes across different operating systems and Linux distributions.

Unattended installations are tough. The methods for doing them differ wildly. On RedHat, Fedora, and CentOS there is Kickstart. On Debian and Ubuntu there is preseeding. Gentoo, Arch, and FreeBSD don't particularly have a framework for unattended installs, but the entire installation process is well-documented and inherently scriptable (if you put in the effort). OpenBSD has autoinstall. Trying to understand each and every one of these potential installation methods was pretty defeating for getting started on a side-project.

A few weeks ago, I finally had the silly revelation that I didn't need to script the installation process -- at least initially. I only had to have working images available somewhere that could be copied to new Linodes. Some OSs / distributions may provide these images, but there is no guarantee that they exist or work. If I tested and hosted them for Linodes, anyone could easily run their own copy.

I began by running the installation process as normal for FreeBSD. After the disk had FreeBSD installed on it, I rebooted into Finnix, made a compressed disk image, and transferred it to an "image host" (another Linode in Fremont running an FTP server). Then I tested the reversal process manually to make sure a new Linode could grab the image, dd it to a disk, reboot and have a working filesystem and networking. (This transfer occurs over private networking to reduce bandwidth costs and thus limits Linode creation to the datacenter of the image host, Fremont.)

Then it was time to script the process. I looked into the existing Linode API client wrappers and noticed none of them were documented. So I took a day to write and document a good part of a new Linode Python client.

I got to work and out came the linode-deploy-experimental script. To run this script, you'll need an API token. This script will allow you to deploy from the hosted images (which now include FreeBSD 11.0 and OpenBSD 6.0). Follow the example line in the git repo and you'll have a Linode running OpenBSD or FreeBSD in minutes.

Clearly there's a lot of work to do on both this script and on the images:

  • Fremont datacenter has the only image host.
  • The script does not change the default password: "password123". You'll want to change this immediately.
  • The script does not automatically grow the file system after install.
  • The TTY config for these images currently requires you to use Glish instead of Weblish.
  • And more.

Even if many of these issues do get sorted out (I assume they will), keep in mind that these are unofficial, unsupported images. Some things will probably never work: backups, password reset, etc. If you need help, you are probably limited to community support. You can also find me with any questions (peaton on OFTC). But for me this is at least a slight improvement on having to run through the install process every time I need a new FreeBSD Linode.