Alces Metalware

A set of tools and conventions for improving the management and configuration of bare metal machines with IPMI and configuration management platforms.

Supported platforms

• Enterprise Linux 6 distributions: RHEL, CentOS, Scientific Linux (el6)
• Enterprise Linux 7 distributions: RHEL, CentOS, Scientific Linux (el7)

Prerequisites

The install scripts handle the installation of all required packages from your distribution and will install on a minimal base. For Enterprise Linux distributions installation of the @core and @base package groups is sufficient.

Installation

TL;DR

One-line installation - note that you must verify you have the correct value for alces_OS:

curl -sL http://git.io/metalware-installer | sudo alces_OS=el7 /bin/bash

Basic installation

Metalware is a system-level package and must be installed by the root user.

1. Become root.

   sudo -s

2. Set the alces_OS environment variable to match the distribution on which you are installing. Currently supported options are el6 and el7:

   export alces_OS=el7

3. Invoke installation by piping output from curl to bash:

   curl -sL http://git.io/metalware-installer | /bin/bash

   If you want to you can download the script first. You might want to do this if you want to inspect what it's going to do, or if you're nervous about it being truncated during download:

   curl -sL http://git.io/metalware-installer > /tmp/bootstrap.sh
   less /tmp/bootstrap.sh
   bash /tmp/bootstrap.sh

4. After installation, you can logout and login again in order to set up the appropriate shell configuration, or you can source the shell configuration manually:

   source /etc/profile.d/alces-metalware.sh

Advanced installation

For further installation techniques, please refer to INSTALL.md.

Usage

Once installed and your shell configuration is sourced, you can access the Metalware tools via the metal command, e.g.:

[root@localhost ~]# metal
  NAME:

    metal

  DESCRIPTION:

    Alces tools for the management and configuration of bare metal machines

  COMMANDS:

    build       Renders the templates used to build the nodes
    console     Display a node's console in the terminal
    edit        Opens a rendered file for editing
    help        Display global or [command] help documentation
    hunter      Detects and caches DHCP discover messages
    ipmi        Perform ipmi commands on single or multiple machines
    orchestrate Orchestrate virtual machines
    power       Run power commands on a node.
    repo        Manage template and config repository
    status      Display the current network status of the nodes
    sync        Moves staged files into place and service management
    template    Template the files for a node or group to staging

  GLOBAL OPTIONS:

    --strict
        Convert warnings to errors

    --quiet
        Suppress any warnings from being displayed

    -h, --help
        Display help documentation

    --version
        Display version information

    --trace
        Display backtrace when an error occurs

Contributing

Fork the project. Make your feature addition or bug fix. Send a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

Copyright and License

AGPLv3+ License, see LICENSE.txt for details.

Copyright (C) 2007-2015 Alces Software Ltd.

Alces Metalware is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Alces Metalware is made available under a dual licensing model whereby use of the package in projects that are licensed so as to be compatible with AGPL Version 3 may use the package under the terms of that license. However, if AGPL Version 3.0 terms are incompatible with your planned use of this package, alternative license terms are available from Alces Software Ltd - please direct inquiries about licensing to [email protected].