Rocky Linux and Packer

It has been a while since I last looked at running Packer external link locally, when I did CentOS 8 had just been released. Since then, there has been a little drama around the on-going support of CentOS which is best summed up by the following post in /r/sysadmin/ external link: Off the back of this announcement the Rocky Linux project external link has been announced, developed and then released. The project describes itself as follows:...

August 28, 2021 · 4 min · Russ McKendrick

Packer CentOS 8

Now that CentOS 8 has been out for a few weeks I decided it was time to dip my toe in the water and update the CentOS 7 Packer scripts I had to work with CentOS 8. For those that don’t know, Packer by Hashicorp external link, is a tool which allows you to build your own images from a number of sources and use them on a number of platforms — Hashicorp describe Packer as;...

October 13, 2019 · 2 min · Russ Mckendrick

Building Vagrant Boxes with Packer in Atlas

I have a need to create both some Ubuntu and CentOS Vagrant boxes for a project I am working on. Normally I would have created them on my local machine, uploaded the artifacts to an Amazon S3 bucket and then published them using Atlas external link (formally Vagrant Cloud external link). However in the past month HashiCorp external link have updated Atlas so that you can now build Packer external link templates directly within Atlas and publish the artifacts as Vagrant Boxes, all free of charge....

July 26, 2015 · 3 min · Russ Mckendrick

Production Ready Images with Packer

I have watched numerous videos and seen quite a few slide decks which cover tools such as Puppet, Chef & Ansible. I have witnessed an entire rack of servers PXE boot, installing their base operating systems, configuring their services and then finally checking out a copy of a production ready codebase. Even after seeing this several times the old school sysadmin in me still thinks this is witchcraft. In the world of dedicated servers or virtual machines this is great, however when it comes launching an auto-scaling instance in a service such as Amazon Web Services using orchestration tools in real-time could be the difference in your application staying online or failing....

February 2, 2015 · 2 min · Russ Mckendrick