Cloud Init ISO

Many premade cloud images (e.g. Fedora Cloud, Ubuntu Cloud) use some form of cloud-init to set instance/user metadata, such as hostnames and SSH keys. This works well when used in a cloud infrastructure such as EC2 or OpenStack that can seed this data, but not so well when used for local VMs, or an out-of-the-box XenServer installation.

However, cloud-init supports an CD/ISO datasource, which can be loaded whether running the machine locally in KVM, VirtualBox, or on a XenServer host.

This repository and guide aims to make this task a lot easier by pre-seeding a template and script. It draws heavily on existing resources (2, 3).

Usage

1. Clone this repository. (optional: maybe create and checkout your own branch?)
2. Modify the meta-data YAML file to specify your instance-id and local-hostname.
3. Modify the cloud-config YAML file to specify a password and/or SSH keys; the cloud image determines the default user's login name (e.g. fedora in Fedora Cloud).
4. (optional) Commit your changes in git. This helps the build script name your ISO.
5. Verify that you have the dependency genisoimage. In RHEL/CentOS/Fedora, sudo yum install genisoimage; in Ubuntu/Debian, sudo apt-get install genisoimage.
6. Build the ISO using ./build.sh. You can either specify an output filename as the first parameter (e.g. ./build.sh output-file.iso), or you can let the script decide on the filename. If you are working inside a git repository, the build script should name your file after the branch and commit hash, such as frost-init-20141228.4d48bab28b6d8f9c43f7b6e36238ef6863b41e90.iso.
7. If everything went well, attach the ISO file to your VM by methods conventional to your virtualization hypervisor.
8. Boot the VM!

License

Some parts of this project are clearly not original. However, the bash script is hereby licensed under the MIT License; see LICENSE.