May 28, 2018

Experiments with Packer and Vagrant on CentOS

  —A look at Vagrant and Packer (CentOS).

In Experiments with Packer and Vagrant on Debian I discussed my experience with Pierre Mavro's packer-debian project. Here I discuss my experience with Packer and Vagrant on CentOS.

My exploration of CentOS relies on work done by Gavin Burris. I extended  Gavin's work to include CentOS 7.2. Using Gavin's example, I was able to bring up a Vagrant box using Virtual Box on CentOS 7.2-1511 in a matter of minutes.

One problem I encountered in my test environment took a while to solve. I executed:

        > packer version
        > Packer v0.10.1
        > packer build centos7.json

dd returns a non-zero return code with these commands:

        > sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/boot/zero bs=1M
        > sudo rm -f /boot/zero
        > sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/zero bs=1M
        > sudo rm -f /zero

Packer reports the following errors:

        > virtualbox-iso: dd: error writing ‘/boot/zero’: No space left on device
        > virtualbox-iso: 397+0 records invirtualbox-iso: 396+0 records out
        > virtualbox-iso: 415494144 bytes (415 MB) copied, 1.05651 s, 393 MB/s
        > ==> virtualbox-iso: Unregistering and deleting virtual machine...
        > ==> virtualbox-iso: Deleting output directory...
        > Build 'virtualbox-iso' errored: Script exited with non-zero exit status: 1

Ouch. Packer reasonably deletes what it believes to be a broken Virtual Box.

To correct this, replace the dd commands above with the following:

        > sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/boot/zero bs=1M || sudo rm -f /boot/zero
        > sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/zero bs=1M || sudo rm -f /zero

Problem solved!

The problem is that dd has to fill the device which means it must exit with a non-zero return code.

While interesting, I ended up removing the dd commands altogether. My modifications to centos7.json.