= No-touch Ubuntu 22.04 LTS bare metal autoinstalls with cloud-init and USB sticks =




I spent the last few weeks getting deep into autoinstalls for Ubuntu. I couldn't find a single doc that explained all the complex moving parts. As a result, there was a lot of trial and error. I finally understand the bigger picture and hope to share it with others:
How to automate a bare metal Ubuntu 22.04 LTS installation
I also took a detour for doing a similar thing to Raspberry Pi and Ubuntu

Hope they help your future server automation!

This is cool, but I feel like it's a bit convoluted. Why wouldn't you build a custom image from something like Packer and then PXE boot for fully hands-off provisioning? That's what I do for the unavoidable bare metal machines, although I much prefer using Terraform on virtualized machines - it's just so fast

I agree the solution can come across as convoluted (I take blame for that) and I would 100% recommend Packer and PXE boot for an enterprise environment

In my case, I wanted less
*things* to manage or deal with. I don't need any additional tools other than the OS. My settings and configurations are all plain text files. There's no PXE configuration settings required, I just plug in a USB, reboot, and grab a coffee

I guess it comes down to use case or priorities

I also agree with VMs being preferred, but I've found myself doing a lot of work with bare metal compute in my home lab (Kubernetes with GPU acceleration / Anthos on Bare Metal / funky eBPF. VMs can only take my learning so far. I'm a slow learner, so I need to do things the real/hard way before I understand lol
Nice! I've been looking at a way to automatically provision my laptops and my test machines. This should help me out. :)
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