Re: Advice about GuixSD on Serveraptor?

[ng0 <contact.ng0@cryptolab.net>]

ng0 transcribed 1.3K bytes:
> Leo Famulari transcribed 2.0K bytes:
> > On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 09:06:09PM +0000, ng0 wrote:
> > > IN-Berlin wants a raw image (they have read our documentation).
> > > The way their system works is that you sent
> > > them your ssh pubkey, they initialize a basic Debian system depending on
> > > the size you chose, and you can login once you get the hostname etc.
> > > They have an out-of-band consoleserver where the ssh key is placed
> > > aswell for the machine.
> > > I don't work with this non-profit organization, but having a way to
> > > define ssh pubkeys in the system config would be super useful for this.
> > > Right now I'm about to create my own system and just sent it to them as
> > > soon as I feel up to it.
> > > If they could simply create the system in their infrastructure, that
> > > would be an incredible speedup and reproducible.
> > > I don't know much about the out of band consoleserver, I have to ask
> > > if that's somehow relevant or if it simply needs some initrd settings to
> > > expose it to the server.
> > 
> > Interesting! I'll probably take a look at this when I got some free
> > time.
> 
> I'll write an email to IN-Berlin asking about the consoleserver this
> week.
> If it's nothing special, we could provide this bare image, and people
> could download it as the GuixSD with ssh + whatever is needed for it to
> work out in server context as a start.
> 
I just realized the last sentence is not good.
Correction:
If IN-Berlin uses (or needs) nothing special for the consoleserver to
make use of the virtual servers within IN-Berlin infrastructure, I think
it would be best if we (as Guix) could provide an extended bare image
for servers which would include ssh-daemon on default port with password
login enabled, where the password is not empty. That's a workaround I
can imagine to be generic enough for all use cases.
For the one of IN-Berlin and maybe similar hosters who use ssh pubkeys,
it would be great to document for them how to recreate this image in
easy steps and insert the clients ssh pubkey for the root account (or an
named user) on the system.

What do you think about this?