Shoelaces: painless server bootstrapping

Speaker: Raúl Benencia

Track: Systems administration

Type: Short talk (20 minutes)

Room: Auditório

Time: Jul 26 (Fri), 11:30

Duration: 0:20

This talk will be an introduction to Shoelaces, a tool to automate the bootstrapping of servers. I’ll share how we use it to dynamically generate preseed files that can be used along with the Debian-installer.

Shoelaces serves iPXE boot scripts, cloud-init configuration, and any other configuration files over HTTP to servers booting over iPXE. It also does a few other things to make it easier to manage your server deployments, such as:

  • using templates to avoid repetition
  • automatic install-script selection by using IP, network or PTR of the booting server.
  • Shoelaces is lightweight. Given that it was coded in Go, it’s distributed as a single binary and does not have heavy dependencies. It also does not use any database, making it’s installation and usage a bliss.
  • provides a simple but nice UI to show the current configuration, and history of servers that booted.

The target audience for this talk is administrators that have to install baremetal servers on a regular basis and are looking forward to automate this task.

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