Basejump

Inventory Management and End to End Provisioning. Basejump is written entirely in python.

Installation

Basejump can be setup in many ways. You can clone/fork the repo and simply run it as you would any django app, or you can use the provided chef cookbook. A fixture is provided to insert some demo data. The default username/password is admin/admin.

Standalone

git clone [email protected]:kplimack/basejump.git
cd basejump
./manage.py syncdb
./manage.py runserver|run_gunicorn

Chef

Simply add recipe[basejump] to your node's run_list.

{
  "name":"my_node",
    "run_list": [
        "recipe[basejump]"
     ]
}

Requirements

• Centos >= 5
• Debian >= 6

packages

• mysql - inventory database (could easily swap in any other database you like)
• tftpd - tftp server for kicking hosts
• xinetd - run tftp server via xinetd
• syslinux - syslinux

optional packages

• apache - frontend to proxy for gunicorn, since gunicorn ain't so good at it
• nginx - frontend to proxy, same as apache, but lighter and probably more apt
• supervisord - controls gunicorn processes
• gunicorn - python application server

Debugging

The best way to debug basejump is to run it manually (not via supervisord/gunicorn). You will get more debugging output than gunicorn logs. You can also check the logs, which go to /var/log/supervisor/basejump-std{out,err}. When basejump gets a request for a preseed or kickstart file, it will log the incoming request and response to $BASEJUMP_PATH/kicker.log.

Running basejump in debug mode (chef deployed)

cd /data/www/basejump/
source ./shared/env/bin/activate
cd current
pip install -r requirements.txt
./manage runserver 0.0.0.0:8080

Running basejump in debug mode (standalone)

cd /data/www/basejump/
source ./env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
./manage runserver 0.0.0.0:8080

Caveats

While testing Debian systems, I noticed that I was unable to get the host to send it's MAC address along with the preseed file request. RHEL has an option called kssendmac and Debian is supposed to have something called IPAPPEND (it's in the syslinux docs), but it doesn't work. So we (Andrew Stone) and I rolled our own initrd.gz which sets the client MAC in the USER_AGENT header of the request. You can create your own initrd.gz using the makefile and patch file here [https://github.com/kplimack/debian-initrd].