openstack team mailing list archive

[Pádraig Brady <P@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 05/29/2012 07:35 PM, Nicolae Paladi wrote:
> Hello, 
> 
> I am looking for more information about file injection support in OpenStack
> and find it increasingly inconsistent and incomplete. I have several questions:
> 
> * This wiki article (http://wiki.openstack.org/HypervisorSupportMatrix) claims 
> that file injection is supported in XenServer, is NOT supported inn KVM
> it's not clear about the others. is that still the case? 

One of the key Essex Features was "Hypervisor Feature Parity", including:
Disk Config, resize and file injection.

I've updated the wiki accordingly.

So there is support in "kvm" for injecting ssh keys, net info, root password,
or arbitrary files.

By default there are 3 methods tried in turn to do this:
loopback mount, qemu-nbd, libguestfs.

In Essex injection is supported to the first partition of guest images.
Folsom enables further libguestfs functionality to inspect arbitrarily
complex guest images and find the root partition to inject to.

> At least there is 
> some mentioning of file injection in the openstack xenserver wiki:
> http://wiki.openstack.org/XenServer/Development
> 
> * Is there any guide or man page where file injection is explained? in this
> use case I would like to inject a file to e.g. /etc/security/zzzz.conf at launch 
> time -- is that possible, and if yes how can it be done in the Essex release. 

The API docs explain the "personality" parameter to achieve this:
http://docs.openstack.org/api/openstack-compute/2/content/CreateServers.html
This is exposed on the nova command line tool though the --injected-files option.

> * Are there any discussions about "the future" of file injection?

There are other options, like cloud-init or using a config drive.
You enable a config drive with the nova --config-drive option,
with value as a boolean or a volume ID. See also:
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/config-drive-v2

cheers,
Pádraig.