LFS458 course - Student playground

This terraform script will create the following resources:

Openstack network
Openstack security group rules
For each student two (or five) Openstack instances with a public IP (the public ips are stored under ips)
For each student an individual ssh key pair will be generated (and be stored under keys)
For each student an zip file will be created (and stored under packages)

If you look for the GCP terraform configuration, take a look at the folder gcp_setup.

Prerequisites

terraform (v1.1.7+)
puttygen (tested with Release 0.71)
Openstack Account

Preparation

We need to create the terraform.tfvars file that contains all variables to use this terraform script:

cp terraform.tfvars.example terraform.tfvars

Now fill in all the required variables (e.g. your student names). If you want to also send mails with the provided Python script add all information to mail_info.yaml in the mail folder. The student list can be read from the yaml file with the following command: yq -r '.attendees | map("\"" + .Short + "\"") | join(", ")' mail/mail_info.yaml.

Run terraform

In the first step we need to initialize all the modules and providers:

# Otherwise the project from OS_CLOUD will be used
unset OS_CLOUD
terraform init

See here how to setup a clouds.yaml for Openstack and terraform. Ensure that the OS_CLOUD environment variable is unset otherwise the value of this environment variable will be used to located the cloud config. Now we can verify everything with the plan step: terraform plan if everything looks fine just apply the changes: terraform apply After the creation of the instances run ./scripts/check_connection.sh to check that all instances are reachable with the ssh key.

Remote state

Terraform state is stored locally by default. The main.tf contains the required backend config snippet to enable remote state with a single command. This could be useful if you have to hand over the training environment to someone else.

Automatically download and unpack solutions

In order to automatically download and unpack solutions, set the variable solutions_url to the URL provided by the Linux Foundation. The solutions will be unpacked on every machine in the /home/student/LF* directory.

see terraform.tfvars.example for an example, you'll have to provide the Linux Foundation provided username and password inside the url.

Bonus: Automatically patching solutions

If you find that the official solutions contain errors, you can also automatically fix them and patch all the solutions you automatically downloaded.

To do that:

Download the solutions on your machine using the official URL (of course use the correct username and password)

wget https://training.linuxfoundation.org/cm/LFS458/LFS458_V1.22.1_SOLUTIONS.tar.xz  --user=**USERNAME** --password=**PASSWORD**

Unpack the tarball
Duplicate the unpacked directory:
```
cp -a LFS458 LFS458patched
```
In the LFS458patched directory (or whatever you named it), edit, delete and create all files as needed

create a patch for the whole tree:

diff -ruN LFS458 LFS458patched > solutions.patch

Copy the solutions.patch file (using exactly this name) to the terraform base dir (next to your terraform.tfvars file)

Sending Mails

Prepare Gmail API

Create a GCP project (or use an existing one)
Enable the GMail API for the project (same link as above)
Create credentials (consent screen & OAuth client ID) Configure the consent screen for a desktop app. You will see it when you first use the credentials.
Store the credentials as credentials.json in the mail directory.

Prepare Python venv and config files

cd mail
python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt

Adjust the config and template files:

Add all your attendees to the mail_info.yaml file
Adjust the mail text in mail_template.txt

Send mails

Finally send the mails and the attachments with: .venv/bin/python send_mails.py

Clean up

In order to clean up everything just run: terraform destroy && rm ./keys/*.ppk

inovex / lfs458-course-prep