bare(-metal servers) v23

Set platform: bare in config.yml

This platform is meant to support any server that is accessible via SSH, including bare-metal servers as well as already-provisioned servers on any cloud platform (including AWS).

You must define the IP address(es) and username for each target server:

instances:
  - node: 1
    Name: igor
    platform: bare
    public_ip: 192.0.2.1
    private_ip: 192.0.2.222
    vars:
      ansible_user: xyzzy

You must ensure that

TPA can ssh to the instance as ansible_user
The ansible_user has sudo access on the instance

SSH access

In the example above, TPA will ssh to xyzzy@192.0.2.1 to access the instance.

By default, TPA will run ssh-keygen to generate a new SSH keypair in your cluster directory. The private key is named id_cluster_name and the public key is stored in id_cluster_name.pub.

You must either set ssh_key_file: /path/to/id_keyname to use a different key that the instance will accept, or configure the instance to allow access from the generated key (e.g., use ssh-copy-id, which will append the contents of id_cluster_name.pub to ~xyzzy/.ssh/authorized_keys).

You must also ensure that ssh can verify the host key(s) of the instance. You can either add entries to the known_hosts file in your cluster directory, or install the TPA-generated host keys from hostkeys/ssh_host_*_key* in your cluster directory into /etc/ssh on the instance (the generated tpa_known_hosts file contains entries for these keys).

For example, to ssh in with the generated user key, but keep the existing host keys, you can do:

$ cd ~/clusters/speedy
$ ssh-copy-id -i id_speedy xyzzy@192.0.2.1
$ ssh-keyscan -H 192.0.2.1 >> tpa_known_hosts

Run tpaexec ping ~/clusters/speedy to check if it's working. If not, append -vvv to the command to look at the complete ssh command-line. (Note: Ansible will invoke ssh to execute a command like bash -c 'python3 && sleep 0' on the instance. If you run ssh commands by hand while debugging, replace this with a command that produces some output and then exits instead, e.g., 'id'.)

For more details:

Distribution support

TPA will try to detect the distribution running on target instances, and fail if it is not supported. TPA currently supports Debian (10/11/12; or buster/bullseye/bookworm), Ubuntu (16.04/18.04/20.04/22.04; or xenial/bionic/focal/jammy), and RHEL/CentOS/Rocky/AlmaLinux (7.x/8.x) on bare instances.

IP addresses

You can specify the public_ip, private_ip, or both for any instance.

TPA uses these IP addresses in two ways: first, to ssh to the instance to execute commands during deployment; and second, to set up communications within the cluster, e.g., for /etc/hosts or to set primary_conninfo for Postgres.

If you specify a public_ip, it will be used to ssh to the instances during deployment. If you specify a private_ip, it will be used to set up communications within the cluster. If you specify both, the public_ip will be used during deployment, and the private_ip for cluster communications.

If you specify only one or the other, the address will be used for both purposes. For example, you could set only public_ip for servers on different networks, or only private_ip if you're running TPA inside a closed network. (Instead of using public/private, you can set ip_address if you need to specify only one IP address.)

Starting afresh

To start afresh with a cluster on the bare platform, use the appropriate external tools to reinstall, reimage, or reprovision the servers, and repeat the process described in this document. If your new servers have different IP addresses or if you have a complex ssh setup, it may be easier to run tpaexec deprovision to remove all the locally created files and then tpaexec provision to recreate them, followed by repeating the process from this document, as above.

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