racker VS Flatcar

If someone wants to try out IPMI locally with VMs, here is a setup for that: https://github.com/kinvolk/racker/tree/main/racker-sim (you don't need to use Flatcar and Racker)

When working on automated bare-metal provisioning of Kubernetes clusters (the main purpose of the repo https://github.com/kinvolk/racker) it's quite time consuming to test on actual hardware. Also, the hardware may be in use at the moment, or you don't even have access to a free full rack. It was nice to see that there is IPMI support for QEMU and that ipmi_sim integrates, but it was quite hard to set up. Especially the requirement that the BMCs should get their IP address via DHCP on the internal network is a bit more complicated/hacky. If you need to test IPMI commands or develop your own IPMI automation, have a look at this, otherwise it may serve as a demo on how to do Immutable Infra with your on-prem servers.

Sounds like you're looking for the CoreOS Linux successor FlatCar https://www.flatcar.org/

It's actually based on some ChromeOS update tools under the hood but is a regular Linux distro, just super minimal and designed to run containers.

I guess if you found my comment to be "comically hyperbolic" then replying to mine with a "comically reductionist" is fair game

So, anyway, I actually did dig up a concrete example of my experience with it, and I cannot link to the "Additional information" section but that is both why I think the thing was a mess and also why the Miroservices YT joke resonated: https://github.com/flatcar/Flatcar/issues/220

I think the CoreOS boot strategy was decomposed into a bunch of different executables, each responsible for doing their own little slice of the world. Maybe it drew inspiration from systemd in that way. But, just like my real life experience with microservices, it requires keeping a bunch of different projects and their upgrade paths in ones head, knowing their disparate config formats, and when one of them inevitably has a bug, understanding how to troubleshoot what went wrong with the system as a whole

And, again in trying to be reasonable in this discussion[1] I do also understand why one would opt for the data URI, given how much of the rest of Ignition loads content from URLs. I don't believe cloud-init has that remote content paradigm baked into in nearly the same way, so I hear you about that.

And yes, my belief is that JSON is a data-exchange format from _computer to computer_ and making people write them is a poor DX choice, IN MY OPINION. And, to reiterate, I know that CoreOS's perspective is that it is a computer-to-computer transmission from the transpiler-project-o-the-day to the Ignition binary, but that is predicated on one having access to that transpiler binary in all cases, which is quite different from the problem that cloud-init is trying to solve

fn-1: I'm sorry you got hurt by my "tire fire" outburst, and that evidently derailed this whole interaction, but it was my experience