Custom ISO launching System Service

Archive RancherOS
1

I’m trying to build a custom iso that launches one of the build in system services that is included by default (open-vm-tools specifically).

I tried adding this to os-config.tpl.yml under the service section:

  open-vm-tools:
      image: rancher/os-openvmtools:v0.8.0-rc1
      command: /usr/bin/vmtoolsd
      privileged: true
      labels:
        io.rancher.os.scope: system
      restart: always
      pid: host
      ipc: host
      net: host
      uts: host
      volumes_from:
      - command-volumes
      - system-volumes

I can build the iso and the it launches the service, but there seem to be permissions issues…

What I would actually need is to build an iso that starts with open-vm-tools enabled, basically running:

sudo ros service enable open-vm-tools

on boot.

How could this be achieved? I can’t find any documentation on the subject. Here https://rancher.com/docs/os/v1.x/en/configuration/ I found how to build the iso, and this works, but launching the service seems to be the problem.

2

What kind of permission issues do you run into?

3

Hi Josh,

thanks for your answer.
I actually solved the issue with the permissions: see more here:

But I have run in to an other issue, could you maybe land me a hand? It is in the thread mention above.

4

I kind of solved it, if someone is interested you can find it here:

This is more like a proof of concept and works now only on docker-machine and vsphere and needs at least 2512 MB RAM…

Are there plans to make something like this possible in a more general way?

5

Making it easier to build custom ISOs and other build artifacts is certainly on the roadmap.

The large memory usage is mainly due to having to use Ubuntu as a base image for open-vm-tools. https://github.com/rancher/os/issues/1487 should help with this.