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.