At work we’re using a small Python script to
- do some sanity checking (hostname checks, acquiring IP address etc)
- clone a VirtualBox machine (needs to be stopped because of Bug 9255)
- modify machine to according # of CPUs and amount of RAM
- mount the disk locally,
- mount the disk’s first partition locally,
- put SSH keys in place, used during initial provisioning,
- update network setting files, including udev rules (/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules) to get predictable network card names and being able to map them to IP addresses
- unmount all above,
- generate new DNS and basic Puppet manifest files, reload services (puppet),
- boot it,
- run puppet agent on the new machine to generate and push client signing request to puppetmaster
- sign cert on puppetmaster,
- run puppet to have the machine finish it’s provisioning (overwrites the SSH keys)
Done. :-)
To issue commands over SSH we’re using Fabric (and might, or might not, move to using Serf).
