blacksmith

Blacksmith, Bare-Metal CoreOS Cluster Manager

Blacksmith is a collection of DHCP, PXE, TFTP, and HTTP servers, created with the purpose of booting CoreOS on bare-metal machines, configuring them by serving generated cloud-config and ignition files, and maintaining the cluster over the time. Blacksmith uses etcd to store the states, and to elect a leader. So you can run multiple instances of Blacksmith to provide a high available CoreOS over bare-metal infrastructure.

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Workspace and Templating

The cloud-config and ignition files, and the bootparams string which is passed to the kernel at boot time, are provided by executing templates for each machine. These templates, along with CoreOS images and other binary files forms the runtime environment of your cluster. In Blacksmith, we call this folder Workspace. For more information on the structure of a workspace, check the workspace doc.

Running in Docker

Blacksmith is available as a Docker image called cafebazaar/blacksmith.

Because Blacksmith needs to listen for DHCP traffic, it has to run with the host network stack. You can use install-as-docker.sh to run blacksmith as a docker container. The script has made some assumptions to provide some of the required arguments of the blacksmith command. To customize it according to your network layout, currently you have to edit the script.

$ sudo ./install-as-docker.sh <workspace-path> <etcd-endpoints> <network-interface>

DNS

In some IaaS environments, machine names are resolvable in the internal network. Some softwares (Kubernetes?) count on it. To provide similar functionality, you need to run SkyDNS on the same instances you run Blacksmith on. Blacksmith will configure them through etcd.

Documentation

Check this.

Development

You can use Vagrant to quickly setup a test environment:

make blacksmith

### Clone and prepare a workspace
mkdir workspaces
cd workspaces
git clone https://github.com/cafebazaar/blacksmith-kubernetes.git
cd blacksmith-kubernetes/binaries
./download-all.sh
cd ..
# put your key into ssh-keys.yaml
./build.sh
cd ..
ln -s blacksmith-kubernetes/workspace current

# Start 3 machines, which will be provisioned to serve a 3-node etcd cluster,
# 3 working instances of SkyDNS, and a 3-node Blacksmith cluster
vagrant up --provider=libvirt

### Check the logs
vagrant ssh pxeserver1 -c "docker logs -f blacksmith_docker"

### In another terminal, start a client machine
vagrant up --provider=libvirt pxeclient1