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Sledgehammer Builder

This content pack contains the workflows and profiles needed to build Sledgehammer on CentOS 8. Additionally, the content pack contains profiles the build expanded drivers for Sledgehammer (exablaze, mellanox, solarflare smart nics).

Design

Following the standard RackN Digital Rebar methods, a workflow is used to build the new sledgehammer on a machine. The machine can be virtual or physical, but must have internet access.

The process drives the machine through a centos 8 installation, customs the image for sledgehammer usage, and uploads the resulting image and profiles into DRP for usage.

Customizations can be done through the parameters. This includes injecting additional tasks or data. See the sledgehammer/customize-tasks parameter for more details.

Prerequisites

DRP Requirements

DRP requires a couple of things to make this happen.

  1. The drp-community-content content pack needs to be loaded. This can be done through the Catalog UX page.
  2. The sledgehammer-builder content pack needs to be loaded. This can be done through the Catalog UX page.
  3. The CentOS 8 iso needs to be loaded into DRP. This can be done by running: drpcli bootenvs uploadiso centos-8-install

That should prepare DRP for building sledgehammer.

Machine ### Requirements

To build sledgehammer, a machine is needed to do an install of centos 8 and then post installation work to capture the image.

The machine needs at least 2GB of memory and 20GB of storage. The machine needs to be able to PXE to DRP and get discovered. Additionally, the machine needs to be able to access the internet. This could be through a second interface with DHCP, see the sledgehammer/extra-ifs parameter.

Note

This will be destructive to the machine in question.

Outbound Access

The target machine MUST have outbound internet access to get packages and components needed to build sledgehammer. To that end, there is a parameter, sledgehammer/extra-ifs that can be used to cause DHCP to run on secondary interfaces. This is particularly useful for VMs that have a second interface that has internet access.

Building Sledgehammer

The following steps will produce a new sledgehammer image.

  1. Discover machine into DRP as normal.
  2. (Optional) Add sledgehammer-full-drivers profile to the machine if you wish to include the additional nic drivers.
  3. Set the workflow on the machine to: sledgehammer-build
  4. Wait for the workflow to complete.

Upon completion, there will be a new iso in the isos directory and a new profile in the profiles view for the new sledgehammer. These are named by the checksum of the image. The last job log for the process contains the name if you are running this multiple times.