assisted-service Live ISO

The assisted-service can be deployed using a live ISO. The live ISO deploys the assisted-service using containers on RHCOS. The assisted-service live ISO is a RHCOS live ISO that is customized with an ignition config file.

How to create an assisted-service live ISO

Create the ignition config

A ignition config that deploys the assisted-service is available at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openshift/assisted-service/master/config/onprem-iso-config.ign.

Download this ignition config and modify it to include your ssh public key and your registry.redhat.io pull secret. The example below assumes your pull secret is saved into a file called auth.json.

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openshift/assisted-service/master/config/onprem-iso-config.ign

export SSH_PUBLIC_KEY=$(cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub)
export PULL_SECRET_ENCODED=$(export PULL_SECRET=$(cat auth.json); urlencode $PULL_SECRET)

sed -i 's#replace-with-your-ssh-public-key#'"${SSH_PUBLIC_KEY}"'#' onprem-iso-config.ign
sed -i 's#replace-with-your-urlencoded-pull-secret#'"${PULL_SECRET_ENCODED}"'#' onprem-iso-config.ign

Currently, the upstream assisted-service container image cannot be used with the live ISO. You will need to build a custom container image and push it to quay.io.

export SERVICE=quay.io/<your-org>/assisted-service:latest
make build
docker push ${SERVICE}

Then update the ignition config file to use your assisted-service container image.

sed -i 's#quay.io/ocpmetal/assisted-service:latest#'"${SERVICE}"'#' onprem-iso-config.ign

Download the base RHCOS live ISO

The base live ISO is extracted from a container image. Run the container image containing the ISO, copy the ISO, and then stop and remove the container.

podman run --privileged --pull=always --rm \
  -v .:/download -w /download \
  --entrypoint /bin/bash \
  quay.io/ocpmetal/assisted-iso-create:latest cp /data/livecd.iso /download/livecd.iso

Create the assisted-service live ISO

Finally, use the ignition config (onprem-iso-config.ign) and the base live ISO (livecd.iso) to create the assisted-service live ISO.

podman run --rm --privileged  -v /dev:/dev -v /run/udev:/run/udev -v .:/data  \
  quay.io/coreos/coreos-installer:release iso ignition embed -i /data/onprem-iso-config.ign -o /data/assisted-service.iso /data/livecd.iso

The live ISO, assisted-service.iso (not livecd.iso), can then be used to deploy the installer. The live ISO storage system is emphemeral and its size depends on the amount of memory installed on the host. A minimum of 10GB of memory is required to deploy the installer, generate a single discovery ISO, and install an OCP cluster.

After the live ISO boots, the UI should be accessible from the browser at

https://<hostname-or-ip>:8443.

It may take a couple of minutes for the assisted-service and UI to become ready after you see the login prompt.

How to debug

Login to the host using your ssh private key.

The assisted-service components are deployed as systemd services. * assisted-service-installer.service * assisted-service-db.service * assisted-service-ui.service

Verify that the containers deploy by those services are running.

sudo podman ps -a

Examine the assisted-service-installer.service logs:

sudo journalctl -f -u assisted-service-installer.service

The environment file used to deploy the assisted-service is located at /etc/assisted-service/environment.

Pull secrets are saved to a file located at /etc/assisted-service/auth.json.

How to use the FCC file to generate the base ignition config file

The ignition file is created using a predefined Fedore CoreOS Config (FCC) file provided in /config/onprem-iso-fcc.yaml. FCC files are easier to read and edit than the machine readable ignition files.

The FCC file transpiles to an ignition config using:

podman run --rm -v ./config/onprem-iso-fcc.yaml:/config.fcc:z quay.io/coreos/fcct:release --pretty --strict /config.fcc > onprem-iso-config.ign

There is also a make target that you can use, which wraps the above command to generate the ignition file:

make generate-onprem-iso-ignition