Accepted Talks:
Shoelaces: painless server bootstrapping
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.