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Apply Site User Data

You can provide site-specific Edge Installer configuration user data if you need to apply new values or override default values from the Edge Installer user data you created in EdgeForge.

Use the following steps to create an ISO file containing the additional user data and load it to a bootable device, such as a USB stick.

Prerequisites​

  • A bootable device such as a USB drive, or a Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) server.

  • An Edge host with Palette Edge installed. Refer to Installation for more information.

  • mkisofs, or genisoimage, or similar ISO management software.

    • cdrtools or wodim for Windows.

Create ISO​

  1. Create a file called user-data that contains the additional configurations you want to override or inject. Ensure that the file starts with a line that only contains #cloud-config. Only include configurations you would like to add or override. There is no need to include user data that was already present when the ISO image was build in the Build Edge Artifacts step.

    touch user-data

    For example, you can include the following content in the user-data file to connect your Edge host to Wi-Fi. Replace wifi-network-name with the name of your Wi-Fi network and the wifi-password with the password of your network. This requires wpa_supplicant to be included in your base OS image. For more information, refer to Connect Intel NUC Edge Host to Wifi.

    #cloud-config
    install:
      bind_mounts:
         - /var/lib/wpa

    stages:
      network.before:
         - name: "Connect to wifi"
            commands:
            - |
               # Find the first wireless network interface
               wireless_interface=""
               for interface in $(ip link | grep -oP '^\d+: \K[^:]+(?=:)')
               do
                  if [ -d "/sys/class/net/$interface/wireless" ]; then
                        wireless_interface=$interface
                        break
                  fi
               done

               # Check if a wireless interface was found and connect it to WiFi
               if [ -n "$wireless_interface" ]; then
                  wpa_passphrase wifi-network-name wifi-password | tee /var/lib/wpa/wpa_supplicant.conf
                  wpa_supplicant -B -c /var/lib/wpa/wpa_supplicant.conf -i $wireless_interface
                  dhclient $wireless_interface
               else
                  echo "No wireless network interface found."
               fi

  2. Create an empty meta-data file.

    touch meta-data

  3. Create an ISO file using the following command.

    mkisofs -output site-user-data.iso -volid cidata -joliet -rock user-data meta-data

    This generates an ISO file called site-user-data.iso in the current directory.

  4. Flash your bootable device such as a USB drive with the ISO file you just created.

    You can use several software tools to create a bootable USB drive, such as balenaEtcher. For a PXE server, there are open source projects such as Fog or Windows Deployment Services for Windows.

    info

    The site user data ISO file is not bootable. It contains only configuration data, which the system reads after booting from the internal disk. If you use a tool like balenaEtcher to write the ISO file to a USB stick, it may display the corresponding warning. You can safely ignore it and continue writing the image to USB.

  5. Once the Edge host arrives at the physical site, load the USB drive to the Edge host before powering it on. The system boots from the internal disk, detects the USB drive, and automatically applies the additional user data configuration during this first site boot.

Validate​

You can validate that the ISO file is not corrupted by attempting to flash a bootable device. Most software that creates a bootable device will validate the ISO file before the flash process.

If you have SSH access, you can also SSH into the Edge host and locate your user-data file in either /oem or /run/stylus. The site-specific user data is named user-data while the original user data file is named something similar to 90_custom.yaml. If you can find the files on the Edge host, it means the user data has been applied successfully.

Next Steps​

Before you register your Edge host with Palette you must have a tenant registration token. Review the Create Registration Token guide for steps on how to create a tenant registration token.