Ubuntu cloud images helper and EC2/Openstack AMI publisher

Canonical provides a build of ubuntu setup for OpenStack Amazon EC2. These VMs are configured to run on EC2, consumes the EC2 init parameters and more.

More info: Canonical's cloud portal.

To run those ubuntu builds on a local hypervisor, some changes are necessary. The uncloud script runs through those changes.

Import an ubuntu VM archive into EC2 and publish it as an EBS based AMI. A lot of this work is derived from Eric Hammond's blog post Creating Public AMIs Securely for EC2, and his shell script alestic-git-build-ami

Important note: this script assumes that the VM archive can be run by the EC2/Openstack hypervisor. Potential pitfalls that this script does not resolve:

• the hypervisor does not understand the partition
• the kernel will panic (hint: use the 'virtual' build of the kernel)
• the runtime parameters passwed to the VM (ssh keys) are not taken into account by the VM (hint: apt-get install cloud-init)

This script is used at the moment with the a VM created from 'uncloud'. That type of VM is originally made to run on EC2/Openstack. It works fine when re-imported into it.

Another project similar to this is here: https://github.com/kickstarter/build-ubuntu-ami

git clone http://github.com/hmalphettes/ubuntu-uncloud-recloud
cd ubuntu-uncloud-recloud
./uncloud.sh

• Download the latest 12.04 cloud image
• Clone it in the raw format
• Grow its partition from 2G to 15G
• Mount it locally
• Setup the ubuntu user with the ubuntu password via grub
• Disable the cloud-init service
• Clone the disk in vmdk format

Ready to be run in your favorite hypervisor.

• OS Linux; tested on ubuntu
• e2progs: e2fsck, resize2fs, fdisk
• qemu-img, qemu-nbd
• VBoxManage: vmdk conversion (optional)

Define the EC2 keys as environment variables:

AWS_USERID=""
AWS_ACCESSKEY=""
AWS_SECRETKEY=""

Define the URL of the Ubuntu VM archive to download as the environment varable

imageurl=...

Place the pk-.pem and cert-.pem files in ~/.ec2 Check the script and run it:

git clone http://github.com/hmalphettes/ubuntu-uncloud-recloud
cd ubuntu-uncloud-recloud
./recloud.sh

1. Downoad the VM archive (if necessary)
2. Unzip it (if necessary
3. Locate the VM file (if necessary)
4. Clone the VM file into a raw VM file if the VM file is a vmdk (necessary for qemu-nbd).
5. Mount the VM file on the file system with qemu-nbd
6. Run the script lib/recloud-mounted-img.sh to reverse uncloud.
   • reset the grub config to a ubuntu cloud image
   • reset the ubuntu user's password
   • harden the /etc/sshd_config to only accept public keys for authentication
   • delete the chef-connection parameters if present
   • delete the /home/ubuntu/.ssh/ keys and known_hosts
   • wait for the user to manually tweak other things
7. Create a new EBS volume, attach it and mount it to the current instance.
8. Copy into the VM's content into the EBS volume.
9. Unmount everything
10. Create a snapshot of the EBS volument and publish it as an AMI.

1- init job to lazy configure the sshd's keyx; just like cloud-init does but we are disabling it) 2- map 127.0.1.1 to the hostname (not a blocker)