MAAS - configure raid via Web-UI - maas

how is it possible to configure a raid setup for a machine using the web-ui? For the moment, the RAID configuration is directly done using the bios, but I wonder how that could be accomplished using the web-ui as well? The buttons are there, but disabled.

Related

Is it currently possible to set up a { Raspberry Pi } as a [ Wifi hotspot ] in ( headless mode ) *without* installing new software?

I have what I believe to be a very simple question.
Context
I have a Raspberry Pi Zero W running Raspbian Lite (2020-02-13-raspbian-buster-lite.img).
Question
How do I change just one file on the SD Card, e.g. in the host partition, to auto-configure the raspberrypi as a wifi hostpot, and call it raspberrypi.
Also, I would like to be able to set the hotspot to be open, or with a password raspberry (just like the ssh password :) ).
What I tried already
I found lots of instructions on installing software packages, but unless I'm connecting via ssh already, then I can't run commands unless I'm already networked to the pi.
Why do I want this?
I want to be able to do this, for much greater ease of connecting to a raspberrypi in the first instance, for example, along with enabling ssh, this would allow very simple ease of access for incoming connections.
Only an idea
Finally, what does anyone think of the idea of enabling this by default in Raspbian. It can be disabled is required, but would substantially ease the process of connecting to a Pi with a Raspbian image out of the box - allowing a use to see so-called "proof-of-pi" immediately after first boot.
As far as I've seen, configuring the Pi before-first-boot by editing the boot partition files is limited. However there are some custom tools out there where you can look at creating a custom image or design some provisioning steps for your Pi.
PiBakery is a tool for creating custom images of Raspbian. Setting up a WiFi hotspot will most certainly require a custom script for tool installation and configuration.
I know that you can configure a SD card to auto-connect to WiFi (for normal network connections) by creating a wpa_supplicant.conf file and setting some values in boot's config.txt, you may want to check some of the documentation from the Raspbian project regarding config.txt. Keep in mind that the default raspberrypi.org image is slightly different than the Raspbian Project's image, so your mileage may vary.
Finally, depending on your use case for this/deployment strategy, you can also look into changing the Pi's boot mode so that it boots from a network host, kind of like "PXE Boot" for Windows machines. You'd have to host a provisioning server that the Pi can get information from and sync up with, which may be out of the bounds of what you're trying to accomplish, but I figured I'd bring it up!

Using saltstack ssh

Is there a difference between using salt-proxy ssh and directly salt-ssh? I'm interested because according to documentation both aimed to run remote commands without agent installation on the end machine.
You cant simply do salt-ssh on a proxy minion, for which you would have to write your own custom ssh interface to the remote system, because your proxy minion may not support doing salt-ssh.
How to choose between using salt-ssh vs salt-proxy totally depends on the type of a minion system.
As stated in the saltstack documentation - https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/ssh/index.html and
https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/proxyminion/index.html
For salt-ssh to be used, the remote system must have python installed - one of the criteria. For example, controlling ubuntu from centos.
As stated in the salt-proxy doc,
Proxy minions are a developing Salt feature that enables controlling
devices that, for whatever reason, cannot run a standard salt-minion.
Examples include network gear that has an API but runs a proprietary
OS, devices with limited CPU or memory, or devices that could run a
minion, but for security reasons, will not.

Is there a fast painless way to setup a linux distro on VirtualBox?

I like the Docker Hub with dockerfiles idea very much.
Is there a similar way to get a small working linux VirtualBox instance in a few commands, that could also be controlled from a command line?
Vagrant is a great tool that does just what you want and much more! It's a ruby application written for fast and simple setup of minimal development environments.
By default it creates VirtualBox images, but it supports VMWare and many others too. The whole setup of a box is managed by a single Vagrantfile! Your vm options, network settings and provisioning is done there.
Setting up a virtualbox box is as easy as executing just two shell commands. Checkout the Getting Started Guide for an example using Ubuntu.
You can use a vast range of prepared images from the Hashicorp Atlas or build your owns.
Also, vagrant doesn't limit you to one virtual machine per development setup, it enables you to model cluster setups on a single machine using multiple vms. I myself use docker for that part though.
Edit: fixed a typo :<

Configuring Development Environments

If the development environment is run on the host, is there a fast way to configure these and deploy them to multiple machines? If so, how?
Vagrant does this but as virtual machines, which may be painfully slow.
What are some viable alternatives?
Absolutely, if you are talking about using a resource pool to deploy and configure your VMs (dev VMs).
For the sake of simplicity, I assume your virtual environment is hosted on VMWare.
Here are a few things to start off with
For Automating creation of VMs (deploying from templates, configure networking etc) you can use VMWare's PowerCLI (Powershell cmdlets) - more on this here
If your dev environment is purely Windows then, for configuration management, you can use DSC (free) or if you (your org) can afford go the expensive route of using SCCM
If you have a lot of Linux boxes to configure then, fortunately, you have more than one option - Ansible, Chef, Puppet or SaltStack
Spinning off and configuring these machines on demand entirely depends on your needs. One of the (more common ways) to do is, create a VM template (aka base vm) and then deploy a VM from this template.
This base template is usually a bare-bones OS + some common utils + tools - Once a VM is deployed from the template, you can then use one of the above mentioned CM (Configuration Management) tools to install/configure this VM.
Hope this gives some pointers in the right direction

How to Install a Vagrant Box on a Bare Metal Machine?

Is there an established way to take a Vagrant box and use it as the operating system for a "bare metal" machine, i.e. a normal computer and not a hypervisor, without having to sit through an installation process?
Now I understand the common response will probably be "install an OS regularly and then use a proper configuration management tool like Puppet or Chef" but hear me out. Our IT organization would like to create a base Vagrant box with all security-related protocols and applications enforced. Then a configuration management tool like Puppet could install "useful" applications like databases and web servers on top of it.
This works best when a software developer wants to deploy a new utility to development environments or servers - they can write the Puppet code to install exactly what they want, which can be turned over to IT to run it on top of the validated Vagrant box to create a virtual machine server.
By hosting the Vagrant box internally, we can hide the security details from the developer while they write new Puppet code, they can test their Puppet code on the same environment they will run it on, and it will provision much faster during testing since the box is just downloaded once. Most "production" deployments will stay as Virtual Machines.
In rare circumstances, we may want a real, bare-metal server, not a VM, probably when we get new hardware to run more VMs or if the utility we need is very computationally intensive. It would be nice if the existing Vagrant box could be repurposed so bare-metal and virtual servers were indistinguishable.
EDIT: I found a post on askubuntu (https://askubuntu.com/questions/32499/migrate-from-a-virtual-machine-vm-to-a-physical-system) which seems to do what I want, can anyone verify if such a procedure would work on a Vagrant disk image, if there would be necessary cleanup (like Vagrant ssh keys) or if it could be generalized to non-Ubuntu operating systems (since it uses Live CD)?
A Vagrant box packaged for VirtualBox is essentially a virtual disk with metadata. Most likely it's going to have the VirtualBox tools and drivers installed, which won't do much good on a physical system. Not only that, the drivers for the physical system would need to be installed on the box image.
What you're talking about doing is a good use case for some sort of "ghosting" software that simply copies blocks of data to a physical disk. There's really no advantage to using Vagrant here that I can see.