Using Chef-proxmox to maintain Patches to Proxmox host (kernel modules for PPP)

[Martin Cleaver]

Hi - I was wondering:

After reading http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-add-ppp-kernel-support-to-openvz-containers

Before we can use PPP in the container, we must enable the PPP kernel modules on the host system:
modprobe tun
modprobe ppp-compress-18
modprobe ppp_mppe
modprobe ppp_deflate
modprobe ppp_async
modprobe pppoatm
modprobe ppp_generic

Question - how do people maintain a list of modifications they make to their proxmox servers so they can reapply those changes next time they upgrade proxmox?

(EDIT) I noted https://supermarket.getchef.com/cookbooks/proxmox today - is anyone using that?

Cheers,
Martin.

 

[e100]

That Proxmox cookbook (after a quick look) does not look very useful.
It configures a few things, installs some stuff and really seems catered to a specific installation rather than some universal proxmox configuration cookbook.

I use Chef to manage nearly everything, including my Proxmox nodes.

It would be trivial to write a Chef recipe to create an /etc/modprobe.d/ppp.conf file.

 

[Martin Cleaver]

Ok, cool.

So, I hacked together an automated script to install proxmox inside virtual box
And I'm now looking at maintaining, for instance, those pop settings and a vz/mount.vps script that all CTs will run* during mount. (Not least because my chef setup installs e.g. a hosts.deny script that I don't want in dev and I haven't hooked up Proxmox to Chef environments yet).

I'd prefer to use a framework rather than a collection of (my) hacks... can you point me at anything I should use?

Thanks,
Martin

* http://jpmens.net/2012/11/28/bootstrapping-openvz-containers-in-proxmox-ve/

 

[e100]

If I understand your question correctly your wanting to know how to do what your bootstrap script does but with a framework like Chef?

Here is what I do:
Install the base VM with ssh daemon, allow root login and a simple password.
In Chef I create a role for the VM that contains a list of cookbooks/attributes I want applied to that VM.
Then I run a single command:

knife bootstrap 1.11.1 -x root -r "role[server_role_name]"

That will install chef on the node, register it to the chef server then run chef.
I let chef do all the modifications to the VM such as creating users and authorized_keys files.

When I was using OpenVZ I created my own templates that would register themselves with the Chef server on first startup.
All I had to do in Chef is assign it a role.
The Proxmox tool DAB made this really easy.

There are some other tools you might want to look into, Puppet and Salt come to mind.
I prefer and use Chef, but lots of people have good things to say about other DevOps tools.

It would be nice if there was a Proxmox cookbook that could configure anything that is Proxmox specific.
Backup schedules, fence devices, storage, etc, etc.
These are things I rarely change so automating them does not save me much time and I have much more important issues to solve so this is not something I could start on any time soon.

We are drifting off-topic for this forum.