Configure the VM

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Requirements

1. Security first!!
2. Static hostname
3. Active network connection
4. Updated repositories

Let’s go!!

1. Security
   1. Create a normal user for yourself, and grant that user sudo access.
      adduser -m -g users -G wheel -c "System Administrator" sysadm
passwd sysadm The password was set to ‘p@ssw0rd’ in the provided VMDK/VHDX files.
   2. Delete the password for the root user from /etc/shadow
passwd -d root
   3. Set SSH to either disallow root logins (PermitRootLogin no), or only allow root logins with a SSH key (PermitRootLogin without-password)
      sed -ri 's/^#?(PermitRootLogin).*/\1 without-password/g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
sed -ri 's/^#?(PermitRootLogin).*/\1 no/g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
systemctl restart sshd
   4. Log in with your new user.
2. Static hostname
   Puppet generates SSL certificates based on the machine’s hostname. If the hostname changes due to the network being down or misconfigured, we don’t want Puppet to get confused. The hostname doesn’t need to conform to puppet.domain, but it helps a bit.
   sudo hostnamectl set-hostname workshop.vm
3. Active network connection
   The first network interface should have been automatically connected and set up to use DHCP. If not, make sure you have network connectivity and can access the internet.
   Let’s assume we’re connected to a network with available addresses in the 172.30.30.0/24 block and route via 172.30.30.1. We’ll use Google’s DNS for starters.
   1. Edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and add the following:

      BOOTPROTO=none
      IPADDR=172.30.30.2
      GATEWAY=172.30.30.1
      PREFIX=24
      DNS1=8.8.8.8
      

   2. Restart networking
      systemctl restart network
   3. Test with a ping to www.google.com
      ping www.google.com
4. Updated repositories
   1. Install the repositories for Puppetlabs, EPEL and PGDG

      sudo yum install http://yum.puppetlabs.com/puppet/puppet-release-el-7.noarch.rpm epel-release https://download.postgresql.org/pub/repos/yum/9.6/redhat/rhel-7-x86_64/pgdg-centos96-9.6-3.noarch.rpm
      

   2. (Optional) Disable the mirrorlists, and force the use of the TENET’s mirror.ac.za mirror

      sudo sed -ri 's|^(mirrorlist)|#\1|g;s|#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/(.*)|baseurl=http://centos.mirror.ac.za/\1|g' /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-*.repo
      

      sudo sed -ri 's|^(mirrorlist)|#\1|g;s|#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/(.*)|baseurl=http://fedora.mirror.ac.za/\1|g' /etc/yum.repos.d/epel*.repo
      

   3. Update the VM
      sudo yum clean metadata && sudo yum update
5. Reboot

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