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packer-archlinux

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Packer template to deploy and provision my Arch Linux setup.

The resulting machine has two partitions:

  • A small boot partition
  • A swap partition
  • An encrypted root partition

This will set both the root and user passwords to 'vagrant', and the encryption password to 'password'.

Installing on a real machine

You can use this project to install Arch on a physical computer too. After jumping into the virtual console:

Install a basic archlinux set up:

$ systemctl restart dhcpcd # ethernet
$ wifi-menu # wi-fi
$ pacman -Syy
$ pacman -S git
$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/AlexandreCarlton/packer-archlinux.git
$ cd packer-archlinux/http
$ ./install.sh /dev/sda

This will reboot the system. Pull down the ansible-archlinux repository and run the playbook you desire:

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/AlexandreCarlton/ansible-archlinux.git
$ cd ansible-archlinux
$ ansible-playbook --connection=local <machine>.yml

Now that your system is set up, remember to change your passwords:

$ sudo cryptsetup --verify-passphrase --key-slot=0 luksChangeKey /dev/sda3
$ passwd

(Thought: what if we just enabled sshd, and provisioned remotely?)

Issues

I've had a few issues here and there, so I figured I would record some of them here and the workarounds used to circumvent them.

Radeon

On boot, I kept getting an error message similar to:

[    1.000000] [drm:.r600_ring_test [radeon]] *ERROR* radon: ring 0 test failed (scratch(0x8504)=0xCAFEDEAD)
[    1.000000] radeon 000:10:00.0: disabling GPU acceleration

Hopping into the bios and turning off switchable graphics detection and using integrated graphics appeared to solve this.

Helpful links

Upgrading

To use newer ISO files, you'll have to edit:

  • iso_url, pointing to a new url
  • iso_checksum, found on the Downloads page, under "Checksum"

Rolling back

If you've borked your system for whatever reason, simply find the snapshot you wanted to revert to and in your bootflags go:

rootflags=subvol=@/.snapshots/<number>/snapshot

And you'll boot into that snapshot. This can be made into a new, default snapshot with snapper rollback.

Testing in CI

Both Travis CI and AppVeyor do not run virtual machine workers with VT-X enabled. This prevents the launching of 64-bit virtual machines inside the workers, so we are unable to test an actual build to see if it works; at best, we can validate the archlinux.json file.

Development

Building the entire box from scratch takes a long time, especially if you want to test a small role. For this reason, you can build a minimal ArchLinux box with:

packer build archlinux-base.json

You can then build a new box based on this with:

packer build -on-error=ask archlinux-development.json

If a step fails, the VM will remain present so that it can be debugged.