LARS is an Arch Linux based live system intended to be booted via PXE. The main focus is on running installimage to provision virtual and physical machines.

• Project Overview
• How to use
• Configuration
• Using the installimage
• Issues
• License
• Contact
• Contribution

We've got a small diagram showing the different projects in the VirtAPI namespace:

You check out this project on your local computer, modify the config to your needs and create the ISO. It will than be copied to your DHCP server where the ISO will be extracted.

• Copy ext/extract_archiso.sh to your DHCP server
• Copy config_build.sh.example to config_build.sh
• Copy config_live.sh.example to config_live.sh
• add Arch entry to your pxelinux config, see ext/pxelinux_config
• Update the variables to your needs (seeconfiguration)
• install the archiso tools with: pacman -Syu archiso
• run rebuild_and_copy.sh

Every configuration option for the deployment is listed in our two config files. config_build.sh is used during the build process from rebuild_and_copy (outside of the ISO) and from customize_airootfs.sh (inside the ISO chroot). It will be temporarily copied into the build directory and deleted afterwards. The copy won't be included in the ISO (so you could place sensitive information here)!

• DHCP_SERVER - FQDN/IP of your DHCP/Image Server
• DHCP_USER - ssh user to copy the images
• DHCP_PATH - where to place the created ISO
• DHCP_EXTRACT - where is the extract_archiso.sh located on the DHCP server
• ISO_MIRROR - URL to an arch mirror that will be written to the pacman config
• ISO_NFSSERVER - NFS server that serves the installimage itself and images

config_live.sh is used from start_installimage during the usage of the ISO itself. This config file helps the script to find the correct place for installimage configs. This config file is visible to every customer that uses the rescue system so take care about the data you put into it.

• CONFIG_PROTO - protocol for connection to the installimage server
• CONFIG_PORT - the destination port of the used web/ftp server
• CONFIG_SERVER - IP/FQDN for connection to the installimage server
• CONFIG_PATH - URL subdir
• CONFIG_FILE - the file itself

Everything that we configure inside of the iso is configured in airootfs/root/customize_airootfs.sh, important points are (there should be no need to modify this file!):

• we point to an internal mirror if available
• add NFS mount points for installimage if NFS server is available
• use systemd-networkd with dhcp instead of dhcpcd

You can start the installimage with the start_installimage script. This will source the config_live.sh file and try to download a normal installimage autoconfig file, if this fails it tries to download a json hash which will be converted into the needed format. After that, the installimage starts in a screen session and reboots if everything worked well. You can do a fully automated installatio if you attach script=/usr/local/bin/start_installimage to the PXE kernel cmdline.

Github Issues

This Scriptcollection is based on the archiso Package. It is licensed under GPL, all of our changes are based on the AGPL, you can find the license here.

You can meet us in the IRC channel #virtapi at freenode.

We've defined our contribution rules in CONTRIBUTING.md.