#Fedora

Introduction With Fedora CoreOS we currently have two ways to do a bare metal install and get our disk image onto the spinning rust of a “non-cloud” server. You can use coreos.inst* kernel arguments to automate the install, or you can boot the Live ISO and get a bash prompt where you can then run coreos-installer directly after doing whatever hardware/network discovery that is necessary. This means you either do a simple automated install where you provide all of the information up front or you are stuck doing something interactive. [Read More]

Introduction NetworkManager allows connections to be defined in a configuration file known as a keyfile , which is a simple .ini-style formatted file with different key=value pairs. In Fedora CoreOS we’ve elected to use NetworkManager with keyfiles as the way to configure networking. In case you have a standard networking environment with NICs requesting DHCP then you probably won’t need to configure networking. However, if you’d like to have a static networking config or if you’d like to do something more complicated (like configure network teaming for a few interfaces) then you’ll need to create a keyfile that NetworkManager will then use to configure the interfaces on the machine. [Read More]

Introduction For some time now with virt-install (developed under virt-manager) you have been able to specify a kernel and initial ramdisk to start a VM with. The only problem is that the VM will always start with that kernel/initrd (unless you change the definition manually). If you are rapidly testing operating system installations this can be problematic. On the one hand, providing the kernel/initrd allows one to automate the install process from a Linux terminal, or even a script, by specifying the kernel/initrd and also the kernel command line options. [Read More]

Setting Up For The Lab This lab uses a Fedora CoreOS image and several utilities (fcct, ignition-validate) to introduce a user to provisioning and exploring a Fedora CoreOS system. This lab is written targeting a Linux environment with a working libvirt/kvm setup. To perform this lab you need to download the tar archive at this link (signed checksum file) and extract it. We recommend extracting it into your home directory like so: [Read More]

History It’s almost 2020. Fedora 31 came out a month back and I’m just getting around to converting my desktop system to Fedora 31. As mentioned before, for my laptop systems I’ve moved on to Fedora Silverblue. As I continue to containerize my workflows I’m moving more and more of my daily workflows into Flatpaks from the Fedora registry, pet containers (via toolbox) and, single purpose containers. As I continue to convert my workflows into containers I’ll stick with the BTRFS+snapper setup for my desktop system, which still has the benefits of being able to snapshot and rollback the entire system by leveraging BTRFS snapshots, and a tool called snapper. [Read More]

cross posted with this Project Atomic blog post TL;DR Fedora 29 will be End Of Life soon. With it Fedora Atomic Host will have its last incremental release (based on the Fedora 29 stream). Please move to the Fedora CoreOS preview if you can. Last year we introduced the plans for Fedora CoreOS including that Fedora CoreOS would be the successor to Fedora Atomic Host and Container Linux (from CoreOS Inc. [Read More]

Introduction With Fedora CoreOS Ignition is being used to configure nodes on first boot. While Ignition json configs are not intended to be a tool that users typically interact with (we are building tooling like fcct for that) I’ll show you an example of how to deliver a script to a Fedora CoreOS (or RHEL CoreOS) host so that it will be run on first boot. Write the script Let’s say we have a small script we want to run that updates the issuegen from console-login-helper-messages to output the node’s public IPv4 address on the serial console during bootup. [Read More]

Introduction This is an update to my previous post about easily testing PXE booting by using libvirt + iPXE. Several people have notified me (thanks Lukas Zapletal and others) that instead of leveraging PXELINUX that I could just use an iPXE script to do the same thing. I hadn’t used iPXE much so here’s an update on how to achieve the same goal using an iPXE script instead of a PXELINUX binary+config. [Read More]

History It’s 2019 and I’m just getting around to converting my desktop system to Fedora 29. For my work laptop I’ve moved on to Fedora Silverblue (previously known as Atomic Workstation) and will probably move my desktop there soon too as I’ve had a good experience so far. For now I’ll stick my desktop system to this old setup with BTRFS+snapper where I am able to snapshot and rollback the entire system by leveraging BTRFS snapshots, and a tool called snapper. [Read More]

Update: A future post explains how to do this even easier without PXELINUX. Introduction Occasionally I have a need to test out a PXE install workflow. All of this is super easy if you have a permanent PXE infrastructure you maintain which traditionally has consisted of DHCP, TFTP and HTTP/FTP servers. What if I just have my laptop and want to test something in a VM? It turns out it’s pretty easy to do using libvirt and a simple http server. [Read More]