Building a FreeBSD laptop from scratch with Salt-stack

Workstation

Workstation builds also matter, but my preference now is local docker

So this chapter changed a lot...

I am a big FreeBSD user, both in servers and as a personal workstation. Yes, Linux is easier as a workstation, but then so is Windows. And its nice to have the same environments.

I however often find myself putting off important upgrades because my laptop is my working life - losing a day here would cost real money. I need to automate the maintenance of my laptop. And Shell scripts don’t seem “official” enough. (I may occassionally cheat however :)

So as well as installing servers using salt-stack here is how to build a set of DevOps quality scripts to keep your workstation rebuildable at a moments notice, and keep the day-to-day maintenance spruced up and ship shape!

The idea is to install the laptop with FreeBSD 10, point it at the new packaging system, run the miniuon bootstrap, download my own set of salt states, and ... presto.

Starting off

Firstly I need to wipe and install a FreeBSD minimum image onto a machine. Luckily this is easy - just download the latest .img file from FreeBSD.org, and copy it over to a USB.

Visit:

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/10.0/

and pull back the latest *memstick.img file such as

FreeBSD-10.0-STABLE-amd64-20140421-r264704-memstick.img

Now we dd over the image from disk to USB.:

$ dd if=memstick.img of=/dev/da0 bs=1024 conv=sync

Reboot the laptop with USB key attached (ensuring of course the BIOS is set to boot from USB before HDD).

Now install FreeBSD as usual. It is a pretty straightforward install, and well documented in the FreeBSD Manual.

Download and run bootstrap installer

The salt stack bootstrap script essentially downloads salt onto your local machine (OK, a number of potential issues there), and will do various OS specific setups (in FreeBSD’s case, prepare the pkg environment, point at the right URLs etc.)

Unfortunately fetch is a bit rubbish compared to wget, and barfs on SSL certificates like the dodgy ones at github. I should look into it.

$ setenv SSL_NO_VERIFY_PEER 1 $ fetch http://bootstrap.saltstack.org

This seems a very bad idea, as we are opening up to a MITM attack. I would prefer either: * md5 signing * download wget first https://github.com/saltstack/salt-bootstrap/issues/290

This will migrate me to using the pkgng (FreeBSD’s own apt-get setup) convert the laptop to a minion, and then all I need to do is set the right values in /env/salt and call local highstate

  1. Download the appropriate salt-states
  2. apply to /usr/local/etc/salt
  3. run salt-call –local state.highstate

This way I have now applied a set of states I want on the laptop to a local cache location (for these purposes, just Xorg). They include config files etc.

Changes

We want to put the states in /usr/local/etc/salt/states We want to put our own execution modules in /usr/local/etc/salt/states and alter /usr/local/etc/salt/minion to change its module_dirs [] list to include that.

How does salt-call work (brief)?

  1. Process the base environment top.sls file. This is by default /srv/salt/top.sls but can be changed (see file_roots)

What do I actually want on my workstation?

An article per pkg, ala NTP plus the init.sls and assoc state files.

  • sudo
  • wget
  • xfce4 hal dbus xorg randr and multi head
  • urxvt / xterm for unicode http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/fonts $ setfont Lat2-Terminus16
  • aspell
  • bash
  • bsdstats
  • security port scanner gnupg keychain ssh
  • sysadmin jails
  • dbases sqlite postgres
  • webkit
  • sound
  • video
  • curl
  • wget
  • emacs
  • git / git gui
  • sublime?
  • fonts
  • printing
  • Firewall
  • python eco-system
  • ZFS (TBD)
  • web browsers
  • ImageMagick
  • gimp
  • rabbitMQ
  • spreadsheets??

Other needs

  • RPi Routers and NetFlow / packetburst for my local office network

Business Half

  • Reporting and Dotted Co-ordination Framework