Ironic on a NUC - part 1 - Setting things up

Just because a few people have asked, here is what I did to get a standalone Ironic installation going and running in an Intel NUC.

Why a NUC?  Well, the Intel NUC is a cute little piece of hardware that is well suited as a test lab machine that can sit on my desk.  I'm using a DC53427HYE, which is an i5 with vPro.  vPro is a summary term for a bunch of Intel technologies, including AMT (Active Management Technology). This allows us to remotely manage this desktop for things like power management - think of this as an analogy to IPMI for servers.

Getting the VM ready

I like to do my development in VMs, after all, isn't that what the cloud is for? :-) So first off using your virtualisation technology of choice, build a VM with Ubuntu 14.04.2 server on it.  I've allocated 2Gb RAM and 30Gb disk.  The reason for the larger than average disk is so that I have room for building ramdisk and deployment disk images. I've called this box 'irony'.

On the VM you'll need a few extra things installed once you've got the base OS installed:

mrda@irony:~$ sudo apt-get install python-openwsman ack-grep python-dev python-pip libmysqlclient-dev libxml2-dev git rabbitmq-server mysql-server isc-dhcp-server tftpd-hpa syslinux syslinux-common libxslt1-dev qemu-utils libpq-dev python-yaml open-iscsi

mrda@irony:~$ sudo pip install virtualenvwrapper six tox mysql-python

Thinking about the network

For this set up, I'm going to run separate networks for the control plane and data plane.  I've added a USB NIC to the NUC so I can separate the networks. My public net connection to the internet will be on the 192.168.1.X network, whereas the service net control plane will be on 10.x.x.x.  To do this I've added a new network interface to the VM, changed the networking to bridging for both NICs, and assigned eth0 and eth1 appropriately, and updated /etc/network/interfaces in the VM, so the right adapter is on the right network.  It ended up looking like this in /etc/network/interfaces:

# The loopback network interface

auto lo

iface lo inet loopback

# The primary (public) network interface

auto eth0

iface eth0 inet dhcp

        gateway 192.168.1.1

# Control plane

auto eth1

iface eth1 inet static

        address 10.0.0.5

        netmask 255.255.255.0

Setting up DHCP 

We need to make sure we're listening for DHCP requests on the right interface

mrda@irony:~$ sudo sed -i 's/INTERFACES=""/INTERFACES="eth1"/' /etc/default/isc-dhcp-server

Now configure your DHCP server to hand out an address to the NUC, accounting for some of the uniqueness of the device :) The tail of my /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf looks a bit like this:

allow duplicates;
ignore-client-uids true;
authoritative;

subnet 10.0.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {

    group {
        host nuc {
            hardware ethernet <your-nucs-mac-address>;
            fixed-address 10.0.0.251; # NUC's IP address
            allow booting;
            allow bootp;
            next-server <this-servers-ip-address>;
            filename "pxelinux.0";
        }
    }
}

There some more background on this in a previous blog post.

Setting up TFTP

mrda@irony:~$ sudo mkdir /tftpboot
mrda@irony:~$ sudo chmod a+rwx /tftpboot/

We'll need to configure tftpd-hpa rather specifically, so /etc/default/tftpd-hpa looks like this:

TFTP_USERNAME="tftp"
TFTP_DIRECTORY="/tftpboot"
TFTP_ADDRESS="[::]:69"
TFTP_OPTIONS="-vvvv --map-file /tftpboot/map-file"

We'll also need to create /tftpboot/map-file which will need to look like this:

re ^(/tftpboot/) /tftpboot/\2

re ^/tftpboot/ /tftpboot/

re ^(^/) /tftpboot/\1

re ^([^/]) /tftpboot/\1

This is because of a weird combination of the feature sets of tftpd-hpa, isc-dhcp-server, ironic and diskimage-builder. Basically the combination of relative and dynamic paths are incompatible, and we need to work around the limitations by setting up a map-file. This would be a nice little patch one-day to send upstream to one or more of these projects. Of course, if you're deploying ironic in a production Openstacky way where you use neutron and dnsmasq, you don't need the map file - it's only when you configure all these things handrolicly that you face this problem.

And we'll want to make sure the PXE boot stuff is all in place ready to be served over TFTP.

mrda@irony:~$ sudo cp /usr/lib/syslinux/pxelinux.0 /tftpboot/
mrda@irony:~$ sudo cp /usr/lib/syslinux/chain.c32 /tftpboot/

And now let's start these services

mrda@irony:~$ service tftpd-hpa restart
mrda@irony:~$ service isc-dhcp-server restart

Installing Ironic

Just install straight from github (HEAD is always installable, right?)

mrda@irony:~$ mkdir ~/src; cd ~/src
mrda@irony:~/src$ git clone https://github.com/openstack/ironic.git 
mrda@irony:~/src$ git clone https://github.com/openstack/python-ironicclient.git 
mrda@irony:~/src$ git clone https://github.com/openstack/tripleo-image-elements.git

Configuring Ironic

Now we'll need to configure ironic to work standalone. There's a few config options that'll need to be changed from the default including changing the authentication policy, setting the right driver for AMT, setting a hostname and turning off that pesky power state syncing task.

mrda@irony:~$ cd src/ironic/
mrda@irony:~/src/ironic (master)$ cp etc/ironic/ironic.conf.sample etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local
mrda@irony:~/src/ironic (master)$ sed -i "s/#auth_strategy=keystone/auth_strategy=noauth/" etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local
mrda@irony:~/src/ironic (master)$ sed -i "s/#enabled_drivers=pxe_ipmitool/enabled_drivers=pxe_amt/" etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local
mrda@irony:~/src/ironic (master)$ sed -i "s/#host=.*/host=test-host/" etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local
mrda@irony:~/src/ironic (master)$ sed -i "s/#sync_power_state_interval=60/sync_power_state_interval=-1/" etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local
mrda@irony:~/src/ironic (master)$ sed -i "s%#api_url=<None>%api_url=http://10.0.0.5:6385/%" etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local
mrda@irony:~/src/ironic (master)$ sed -i "s/#dhcp_provider=neutron/dhcp_provider=none/" etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local

There's also the little matter of making sure the image directories are ready:

mrda@irony:~/src/ironic (master)$ sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/ironic/images
mrda@irony:~/src/ironic (master)$ sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/ironic/master_images
mrda@irony:~/src/ironic (master)$ sudo chmod a+rwx /var/lib/ironic/images
mrda@irony:~/src/ironic (master)$ sudo chmod a+rwx /var/lib/ironic/master_images

Initialising the database

Since we've decided to use MySQL instead of SQLite, we'll need to setup the schema and update the database connection string.

mrda@irony:~/src/ironic (master)$ mysql -u root -p -e "create schema ironic"

mrda@irony:~/src/ironic (master)$ sed -i "s/#connection=.*/connection=mysql:\/\/root:<database-password>@localhost\/ironic/" etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local
mrda@irony:~/src/ironic (master)$ ironic-dbsync --config-file etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local create_schema

And that's everything that needs to be done to prepare the VM for running ironic. The next post will cover starting the ironic services, building images for deployment, and poking ironic from the command line.