Puppet Powered PXE Provisioning

Super awesome Puppet powered PXE menu and image management for network based installations. Seriously. Its awesome.

Features

• Automatic image fetching
• Menu management for easy selection at boot time
• Host specific menu management
• Supported OSs
  • Debian
  • Ubuntu
  • CentOS
  • RetHat (with baseurl)
  • Fedora
  • Scientific
  • CoreOS

Dependencies

You will need a running TFTP configured. The module now depends on the puppetlabs/tftp module.

Sample Usage

Basic setup

class { 'tftp': }
class { 'pxe': }

This will setup a tftp server and directory and install pxelinux into it with a base configuration.

Images

Here is a sample of how one might stage the network installation images and build menus for selection at boot time.

First, we start by dragging in the pre-reqs for the whole process.

include pxe

Next, lets loop over some data and create a few pxe::installer resources using the new Puppet language methods.

$debian_architectures = ['amd64', 'i386']
$debian_versions = ['squeeze', 'wheezy', 'jessie']

$debian_versions.each |$ver| {
  $os = 'debian'

  $debian_architectures.each |$arch| {

    pxe::installer { "${os}_${ver}_${arch}":
      arch   => $arch,
      ver    => $ver,
      os     => $os,
      file   => "os_${os}",
      kernel => "images/${os}/${ver}/${arch}/linux",
      append => "initrd=images/${os}/${ver}/${arch}/initrd.gz text",
    }
  }
}

This structure could be extended considerably, but it paints a picture for how to build a bunch of resources using the puppet iteration. This module used to recommend use of the resource_permute() function, but that was long before the new Puppet4 language constructs replaced the need for this function. As such, its recommended that you use the pxe::installer resources directly.

Syslinux

By default this module will install the latest version of syslinux, downloaded from kernel.org (You can see the latest version in the manifests/params.pp) file. To install the version that ships with your OS, or to specify a version, pass the syslinux variable to pxe.

For Example:

class { 'pxe': syslinux_version => 'system', }

Menus

include pxe

pxe::menu { 'Main Menu':
  file     => 'default',
  template => 'pxe/menu_default.erb';
}

pxe::menu::entry { 'Installations':
  file    => 'default',
  append  => 'pxelinux.cfg/menu_install',
}

pxe::menu { "Operating System (${arch})":
  file => 'menu_install',
}

pxe::menu { 'Debian':
  file => 'os_debian',
}

Host Configs

pxe::menu::entry { "server1.dyrden.net":
  file    => "01-aa-bb-cc-dd-ee-ff",
  kernel  => "images/debian/i386/squeeze/squeeze",
  append  => "vga=791 initrd=images/debian/i386/squeeze/squeeze.gz",
}