I hope I am right here to ask the following question.
I have been using ContainerLinux from CoreOS and would like to have a look at Fedora CoreOS.
With Container Linux I have been using PXE booting to install also on VMware (I have a mixed environment). I would like to use PXE boot also to test Fedora CoreOS on VMware to save me the work to set-up a bare metal server for these tests.
So far I have used the install kernel, the install init ram disk and the fedora-core-os bare metal image to install on VMware.
My question is if this approach is at all possible. I really hope it is at it will save me the work to set-up a bare metal server in the data centre.
So far the first phase of the installation seems to work fine. When the server reboots the system goes into the emergency.service and hangs with the error:
Failed to set-up standard input: Inappropriate ioctl for device
What you are trying to accomplish should indeed be feasible. The error message you are seeing seems to be related to virtual console setup, but I think it’s a spurious one. The root issue is likely related to the content of your Ignition configuration, or how you are passing it via the installer.
Before digging further into this, please note that we directly provide OVA images. Those are the recommended media for VMware setups, and do not require additional PXE-install steps.
Thanks for the answer. I slimmed down my ignition file to the bare minimum (a user and a method to be able to login) and indeed now it works! So I’ll have to find out what was wrong in my configuration. The transpiler did not complain so it was at least not a silly formatting error. Probably some logical error on my behalf.
Out of curiosity, do you intend to expand on the FCOS configuration options? In CoreOS one could configure network options in the ignition file too. Is that in the pipeline for fedora coreOS?
There is an ignition-validate binary attached to each Ignition release that you can use to validate the syntax of your Ignition config.
Network configuration in FCOS can be done directly by writing configuration files via Ignition. As FCOS uses NetworkManager at the moment, you’ll need to write its configuration directly. We may add some helper logic in fcct later on, see Can't config network · Issue #34 · coreos/butane · GitHub.