How to setup cloud-init in prxmox ve

Cloud-init can help us to deploy or change settings of linux virutal machine via api or manually by ourself.

There are two ways to setup cloud-init: command line or change settings in GUI.

Option 1: Download cloud-init image and setup with shell

Please reference my blog Build Ubuntu 18.04 server with cloudinit support

Option 2: Manually Setup cloud-init

We can do this with 2 steps. 1st step is to install linux(centos,debian,ubunt etc).

Install a linux

I think this step is easy.

Install and setup cloud-init

After installed an linux.

debian/ubuntu

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apt update && apt -y dist-upgrade
apt install -y cloud-init

RHEL/Centos

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yum upate 
yum install -y cloud-init

Create a cloud-init boot disk

1. shutdown the vm shutdown -h now
2. select the vm in PVE web GUI.
3. Then click Hardware.
4. click Add button and select Cloudinit drive.
5. Select Storage on the storage.
6. Then Click Create to create cloudinit drive.
7. Right click the VM and click start to boot the VM.

Change some settings

After setup cloud-init, Seem like it automatically reset your sourelist to default settings and we couldn’t login via ssh with password.

Enable password authentication

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sudo sed -i 's/PasswordAuthentication\ no/PasswordAuthentication\ yes/g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart sshd

Permit root can loing with password

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sudo sed -i 's/#PermitRootLogin\ prohibit-password/PermitRootLogin\ yes/g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart sshd

Change machine-id

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rm /var/lib/dbus/machine-id
truncate -s 0  /etc/machine-id
ln -s /etc/machine-id /var/lib/dbus/machine-id

change hostname with ubuntu 18.04

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sed -i 's/preserve_hostname:\ false/preserve_hostname:\ true/g' /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg

#check settings
cat /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg |grep preserve_hostname
# If it works and you will see:
#preserve_hostname: true

#Set hostname to myserver-forloadbalance2-node175
hostnamectl set-hostname myserver-forloadbalance2-node-175

# reboot host
reboot now

Permit modified sourelist

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sudo cat << EOF >> /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg
apt_preserve_sources_list: true
EOF

Then you can change sourelist without worried about the sourcelist will be overwriten by cloud-init

• Machines that fight over the same IP address