This script reads an OVF environment document at boot time and applies a set of OVF properties to basic system configuration files, allowing the machine to be configured externally without requring any fancy agent or other runtime configuration scripts.
This script is currently only tested against VMWare, however, it is written around using an emulated CDROM device instead of the VMWare tools for OVF property transport.
You will need to set the following OVF properties on your virtual machine, and make sure that they are exposed via the ISO method:
- root_password
- host_fqdn
- ip_0
- netmask_0
- gateway_0
- dns_0
- dns_1
- dns_2
This list of supported parameters could be very easily extended if you needed to configure something application-specific. The above properties are just implementation defaults and are subject to change.
When booting, the temporary CDROM device is mounted, and the OVF document is copied into /etc/ovf-env.xml before reading. This makes reading the XML document post-boot much easier than re-mounting, re- reading/parsing, and again unmounting the temporary CDROM device. Currently this script makes no use of the OVF environment cache in /etc, but perhaps that will come at a later time.