BSDCan2012 - Slide Update J

BSDCan 2012
The Technical BSD Conference

Speakers
Tom Judge
Schedule
Day Talks - 2 - 2012-05-12
Room MRT 205
Start time 10:00
Duration 01:00
Info
ID 309
Event type Lecture
Track Hacking
Language used for presentation English

Building a FreeBSD based Virtual Appliance

How we built the Razorback appliance

Razorback is a framework for an intelligence driven security solution. It consists of a large number of components and dependencies that make the barrier to deployment quiet large for the uninitiated. This talk aims to shed some light on the process of creating a virtual appliance that enabled us to reduce the barrier for people that want to test the system.

Lowering the barrier to entry for a complex project is key for improving deployment of your project, by building a virtual appliance you can cut the setup time from over a day to just a few minutes.

This tutorial aims to cover setting up a VM build environment that will allow you to create custom virtual appliances for you projects that are easy for people to deploy.

We will cover:

  • Setting up the build host for PXE based installation of the appliance.
  • Tuning the installer to install only the components that we need to the vm to function.
  • Deploying tinderbox to build the systems dependencies.
  • Installing the dependencies via the installer
  • Deploying freebsdadmin on the VM to provide a management interface.
  • Customizing the base freebsdadmin package.
  • Adding custom applications to freebsdadmin to manage your application.

The aim is provide a hands on experience so attendees should bring a laptop capable of running 2 small FreeBSD virtual machines. Attendees should also have some basic FreeBSD systems administration experience.

By the end of the session attendees should have a firm grasp on the process of creating a virtual appliance using the freebsdadmin project as the management interface.