Category Archives: Provisioning

Working with the Booked scheduler API

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One benefit of working in a hardware company is that you actually have hardware. I have worked in software for a long time, and I have learned to appreciate when new servers are not such a scarce resource as to impact productivity. However, hardware in our group needs to be shared amongst a large group of developers, and constantly reserved, assigned, and reprovisioned. We use an install of the booked scheduler to reserve servers. As with many tools, I am most interested in using it in a scripted fashion. Booked comes with an API. Here’s some of the things I can do with it.

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When to Ansible? When to Shell?

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Any new technology requires a mental effort to understand. When trying to automate the boring stuff, one decision I have to make is whether to use straight shell scripting or whether to perform that operation using Ansible. What I want to do is look at a simple Ansible playbook I have written, and then compare what the comparable shell script would look like to determine if it would help my team to use Ansible or not in this situation.

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Cleaning a machine

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After you get something working, you find you might have missed a step in documenting how you got that working. You might have installed a package that you didn’t remember. Or maybe you set up a network connection. In my case, I find I have often brute-forced the SSH setup for later provisioning. Since this is done once, and then forgotten, often in the push to “just get work done” I have had to go back and redo this (again usually manually) when I get to a new machine.

To avoid this, I am documenting what I can do to get a new machine up and running in a state where SSH connections (and forwarding) can be reliably run. This process should be automatable, but at a minimum, it should be understood.

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ipxe.efi for aarch64

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To make the AARCH64 ipxe process work using bifrost, I had to

git clone https://github.com/ipxe/ipxe.git
cd ipxe/src/
make bin-arm64-efi/snponly.efi ARCH=arm64
sudo cp bin-arm64-efi/snponly.efi /var/lib/tftpboot/ipxe.efi

This works for the Ampere reference implementation servers that use a Mellanox network interface card, which supports (only) snp.