Ironic-at-home

Having quite a number of assorted servers, it would be nice to be able to do OS installation tasks automatically and in a consistent fashion across the board. There are many tools available to achieve this end, but being an OpenStack fan, I have decided to try out the OpenStack Ironic solution.

Now, being an OpenStack project, Ironic is dependent on a quite a few other OpenStack components. These include AMQP messaging (RabbitMQ), the OpenStack identity service (Keystone), as well as the OpenStack compute, network, block storage, and image services (Nova, Neutron, Cinder, and Glance)

All server state changes will be done by leveraging the existing Salt infrastructure. And for the time being, the Debian 11 packaged OpenStack components are being installed.

What follows is a bit of a build-log of the Salt states for software installation and configuration. And maybe some diving into rabbit holes as we go...

• The AMQP broker (RabbitMQ) has been installed. No configuration so far.
• The PostgreSQL database server has been installed. Configuration so far:
  • PostgreSQL is configured with to listen on all IP interfaces
  • TLS (at least v1.2) communications is required
  • A locally generated set of Diffie Hellman parameters is in use
  • A locally generated 4096 bit RSA key is created
  • A corresponding self-signed X.509 certificate is created, too
• Keystone is being installed.