psyopsOS

psyopsOS grew out of kubernasty, a Kubernetes cluster I’m building for my home lab.

If I’m being honest with myself, I might say that it is simply more fun to build a custom Linux distribution than it is to configure Kubernetes.

If I’m being generous with myself, I might say that it’s an experiment to make maintenance of a fleet of personal servers easier on a single person.

Experimental goals

1. OS is small and fully in RAM, and a single image is used for all nodes.
2. The OS is easy to keep in your head and modify as needed.
3. Upgrading the OS is easy.
4. Nodes can boot and configure themselves over the network.
5. Configuration is kept in source control.
6. Drift is kept in check because machines do not keep state except for explicitly mounted directories.

Implementation

• It’s built in mrled/psyops in the psyopsOS subdirectory, which includes a few more docs.
• It is a customization of the excellent Alpine Linux. Alpine has a powerful and simple way to build reliable livecd ISO images, an extremely fast package manager, and very low overhead. It’s a small layer that’s easy to understand and build something else on top of.
• It uses some custom scripts to work with aports which builds the ISO, including a simple overlay of the livecd filesystem.
• It relies on a psyopsOS-base package for early system configuration
• It uses progfiguration, another experimental project designed for configuration management, for configuration after boot.
• An overlay network called psynet which allows nodes to communicate with one another no matter what physical networks they’re on
• Easy upgrades, just build a new ISO, copy to the node, and run psyopsOS-write-bootmedia