substruct

An easy to deploy foundation for automating the provisioning of baremetal infrastructure via network booting, with a user-friendly web interface for managing OS configurations and tracking hardware inventory.

Components

The project consists of three major compontents:

• substruct which comprises three sub components:
  • Database for storing hardware and deployment information.
  • API for managing the information in the database.
  • Web UI for interacting with the API in a user-friendly way.
• substruct-server for network booting x86_64 and aarch64 hardware.
• substruct-os for gathering information about the hardware of a system.

Goals

The ultimate goals of this project are to:

• Automate the processes for provisioning and reprovisioning hardware.
• Streamline the manual actions required by an administrator to configure various operating system deployments.
• Keep track of hardware inventory, their deployed configuration, and their status.

Requirements

Ideally the only requirements are:

• A single server running Ubuntu 20.04 or RHEL 8.X.
• A single networking LAN interface (for server and clients).
• Any number of client hardware (x86_64 or aarch64) with local disks to provision onto.

The currently targeted hardware is my homelab inventory:

• HP T620 thin clients (x86_64) with M.2 SSDs.
• Raspberry Pi 4 (aarch64) with SATA SSDs connected via USB 3.0.

Scope

This project is being implemented in a tiered scope.

The proposed tiers are:

1. Foundation

Research and determine the how best to leverage technologies such as pxelinux, PXE, NFS, DHCP, and DNS.

Document the initial manual configuration of a Substruct server on both Ubuntu 20.04 and RHEL 8.

The Substruct server should provide everything necessary to implement a working PXE boot using a hard-coded preseed file for Ubuntu 20.04 and a kickstart file for RHEL 7 and 8.

Ideally the Substruct server should:

• Act as the primary DHCP and DNS authority for the LAN.
• Include an NFS server for hosting OS base images.
• Include a web server for the management interface to be added later.
• Clone both Ubuntu apt and RHEL yum/dnf repositories, to reduce bandwidth and latency when provisioning.

2. Framework

Create bash scripts to configure the Substruct server backend on Ubuntu 20.04 and RHEL 8.

Convert the bash scripts to Ansible playbooks.

3. TBD

This step and further steps will largely depend on the tech stack determined for the Substruct backend in step 1.