Using packer without ssh?

[Michael Sumulong]

Is it possible to use packer on a bare bones Linux distro (ie. Tiny Core Linux) that doesn't have ssh installed by default? Right now I'm building a virtual box image by hand using netcat to transfer shell scripts from the host to the virtual machine.

[Alvaro Miranda Aguilera]

On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 5:19 AM, Michael Sumulong <msum...@gmail.com> wrote:

Tiny Core Linux

tiny core is the host?

what guest are you building?

[Michael Sumulong]

No, tiny core is the guest I'm trying to build and the host is Linux Mint.

[Alvaro Miranda Aguilera]

if you can share the json file, i can give it a try..

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[Michael Sumulong]

Here you go...

[Alvaro Miranda Aguilera]

ok, pretty much what i was able to do..

I was thinking to use the boot command and wait to write all the commands on the console and do the install in that way.. will that work ??

[Michael Sumulong]

Ah I'll have to try it out. It'd have to run the installer, do a reboot, then install ssh and add the packer user. 

How does the boot command work exactly? How does it send keystrokes into the VM?

[Alvaro Miranda Aguilera]

it use a keyboard driver from virtualbox, pretty clever trick.

So basically the install, for a OracleLinux is:

boot, wait few seconds, and then type all the necesary commands to kickstart an un-attended install.

I think you can use that to actually do all the installation.

check the last quarter of this page

http://www.packer.io/docs/builders/virtualbox-iso.html

here is what I use at OracleLinux

        "boot_command" : [

            "<tab>",

            " text ks=http://{{ .HTTPIP }}:{{ .HTTPPort }}/ks.cfg ",

            "HOSTNAME={{user `hostname`}} ",

            "SWAPSIZE={{user `swapsize`}} ",

            "ROOTFS={{user `rootfs`}} ",

            "YUM={{user `yumurl`}} ",

            "REPOFILE={{user `repofile`}} ",

            "<enter>"

        ]

so, you have <enter> <tab> and

• <wait> <wait5> <wait10> - Adds a 1, 5 or 10 second pause before sending any additional keys. This is useful if you have to generally wait for the UI to update before typing more.

so if you want to do something, try

"<wait5><enter><wait10><wait10>",

"the commands",

"more commands",

[B. Ehlers]

Just helped on the creation of some tiny core VMs with packer, see https://github.com/GNS3/gns3-registry/tree/master/packer/tinycore-linux

The trick I used is to add openssh early with some boot commands. That doesn't mean that the resulting VM has openssh installed.

[Alvaro Miranda Aguilera]

Hello,

Not sure how much different is boot2docker of tinycore

but there is this packer template for boot2docker if can help to get ideas

https://github.com/mitchellh/boot2docker-vagrant-box/blob/master/template.json

That's the one used in vagrant to spin a boot2docker vm

Alvaro.

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