#geodesic - May 2019

hi everyone, I have a question. Do aws-chamber and vault overlap ?

seems they're for managing aws secrets 🤔

i think chamber is more general purpose

aws-vault is specifically for retrieving an aws credential and assuming an IAM role

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ooops

i totally lost track of time

sorry everyone!

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geodesic 0.106.0 adds support for man pages in markdown

stick all your documentation in /usr/share/docs and run docs update

then using man works as expected

try man faq to test

or help to search

@oscarsullivan_old ☝️

anyone using packer at all? i'm curious why packer isn't in the geodesic image.

nm, i think i see a solution in the slack archives... thanks @oscarsullivan_old for asking this before me. will do RUN apk add --update packer@cloudposse in Dockerfile

Ya just trying to reduce the number binaries. Tempted to remove more from the default distribution in the future, since we have packages for most things.

yes, exactly!

it's for custom man pages

but we are just piggy backing on the existing linux manpage system by installing the generated man pages to /usr/share/man

that means it will wrk with system man pages too

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I tried using s3fs but couldn’t mount sub directories. I saw that you are using it as part of geodesic so posting my question here

Share what you we’re doing ...

Not enough to go on

i am just trying to mount S3 bucket using

s3fs bucketname directoryname

when i cd to the directory i don’t see anything

it is trying to fetch all the subdirectories when i run ls command

s3 is an object store, not a file system. this idea of s3fs confuses me. I've never even thought to use s3 in that way. Though I guess a filesystem is just a specialized object store?

i know but that’s what s3fs does

@Alex Siegman using goofys is a nice escape-hatch for using S3 as a filesystem

not for databases, but great for "legacy" apps that want to read files

in the past, we've used it to store SSH keys and other configuration files.

Could someone help me locate or add aws creds to a built geodesic container? I’m having some issues understanding where geodesic looks for this info, and in what format to provide it. I have no roles yet, and id like to add one for aws so i may assume it.

Hi Jesse - been a little bit since I had the pleasure to use geodesic, but I think I have a good idea where you are stuck... have you followed along with the documentation here?
https://docs.cloudposse.com/documentation/getting-started/

The reference architecture should give you a good idea on where/how the roles to be assumed are meant to be used: https://github.com/cloudposse/terraform-root-modules

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Has anyone run across this error when running make root from the reference architectures?

@jober not that one in particular

but I can maybe help you work through it if you want to zoom

Trying to run it on an active account not sure if it is conflicting with something

I ran on personal account and everything was ok

My hunch is this: see that error in the output about copying overrides? I think maybe that's preventing it from completing.

i was looking at that as well

so I makefile will abort on the first failure

so i think the module is just not getting initialized and that's maybe causing nothing to be written to SSM

Like it says their is no overrides

are you familiar with what we are doing here with overrides?

No

(maybe not this exactly spot, but the pattern itself)

ok

so basically we use the terraform init -from-module=.... pattern everywhere.

That works great, except for the init will bail if there are any .tf files in the current directory

so what we do is stick all those "overrides" (.tf files) in the overrides/ directory

then...

1. terraform init -from-module=....

2. cp overrides/* .

3 terraform init -from-module= (null modules so that it it doesn't try to redwnload)

why do we need overrides?

...that's so we can have a general root module like a "users" module, but not define any users

then we stick the user accounts in overrides/ e.g. overrides/osterman.tf

ahh ok

is it required to have overrides?

i don't think it should be required (fundamentally speaking), but that error is complaining about that.

@Jeremy G do you recall seeing this error when you recently provisioned "that customer" 😃

Is this something new? I copied the reference architectures about a month or 2 ago and setup on a personal account and this did not come up

hrmmm so actually, it might be "new" in the sense we finally got around to updating the ref arch with our latest customer rollout, but not new in the sense we've been doing it for about 6mo

gotcha

basically, every time we do a customer rollout we revise/polish the ref-arch. it's still got it's bugs 😃 (first and foremost it's a device we use to speed up our own engagements)

makes sense

i am just looking at the user module and the code to deal with the overrides to try and gain some insight on the implementation

try and find a work around

I do not have any users setup in the root.tfvars

is this required?

Aha, haven't tested it without probably

ok so i should add it their an try again

so if i add my user to here in the root.tfvars:

# Administrator IAM usernames mapped to their keybase usernames for password encryption
users = {
  #  "<mailto:erik@cloudposse.com|erik@cloudposse.com>" = "osterman"
}

Yes, I believe that should be all it takes.

ok so then do i need to create an overrides folder and anything in their?

no, it should get created for you

ok i will try that

thanks!

well that worked, but now i am getting….

hrmmm odd

that second terraform init should look like:

terraform init -from-module=

that empty -from-module= is deliberate

this is why noobs are the best QA haha

🤣 thanks for sticking in there

Hahaha this will put me miles ahead from where i would be otherwise

it looks like the exported worked to /artifacts/accounts.tfvars

btw i am only initializing audit, dev, staging, test and prod

@jober @Erik Osterman (Cloud Posse) It is required to have at least 1 user configured in root.tfvars because that is how you are intended to have long-term access to the organization accounts.

@Jeremy G thanks! sorry it was not clear that is a requirement. But it makes sense

Unfortunately, the reference architecture is intended to get things started. It is not a full-fledged multi-functional tool.

Forsure! And its awesome!

I am still having issues withe the above error. @Jeremy G do you have any suggestions/insight?

You need to do make reset to clear the errored state

That worked thanks!!!

Hi , i'm seeing the same issue as @jober

just reading through the notes above ...

I saw the same issue above as well…noticed when I ran make root/shell and manually ran cd /conf/accounts direnv exec . make deps in the shell it would initialize but when running make root/provision it would throw error. I was able to get around it however I was not aware of make reset that @Jeremy G mentioned

@Erik Osterman (Cloud Posse) curious to know how you obtain admin user password. I ran reference-architectures however I didn’t pull the password before closing out my shell and deleting my root creds. I have already committed my repos however now I’m not certain proper way to get admin user console password. Any thoughts?

@Tega McKinney, thanks , looking at this now

@Tega McKinney, which directory are you running make reset from ?

@paul.mortimer Not sure; I did not run it however it looks like it’s available in /conf/accounts. @jober may have some insight

Each directory under /conf is a Terraform module to install (except for /conf/helmfiles, which are helmfiles). In a Terraform directory, make deps loads the modules and initializes the Terraform state, and as part of loading the modules, loads a module-specific Makefile. After running make deps you can do all the normal Terraform stuff, but as protection against accidentally overwriting something, you cannot run make deps while there is Terraform state in the current directory. If you are sure you want to clear it out, that is when you run make reset, which deletes everything make deps pulled in and any state Terraform stored in the directory.

@Tega McKinney @paul.mortimer I ran the make reset from the /conf/accounts

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@Jeremy G @jober, thanks for the info appreciate the pointers.

I'm in Australia, so just getting up ... is there any chance i could jump on zoom shortly and walk through this issue with someone?

@Erik Osterman (Cloud Posse) ?

@paul.mortimer best way is to schedule some time here: https://calendly.com/cloudposse

Just curious, when running reference-architecture, i just realized that it does not add users from /config/root.tfvars as admins on the root accounts. That make sense as those users may not be admins. Should it expose a root_admin_user_names and/or root_readonly_user_names var(s) to ensure the ability to administer the account using IAM vs the root email?

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I've followed the reference architecture setup, so i've got an admin group in the root account with users added to it, and the users access sub-accounts by assuming a role

now, in one sub-account I want to enable SSM Session Manager to allow users to create sessions on instances. I've created an appropriate policy, but I'm stuck on where to attach the policy to. I probably should attach this policy to a group, but in the sub-account there are no users/groups of course.

But i can't attach it the group in the root account, because the policy is in the sub-account

anyone know the correct approach here?

@Erik Osterman (Cloud Posse) i'm sorry if this has already been asked, but is there a rough timeline on when geodesic will be updated to terraform 0.12?

Working on it as we speak

Might have it ready by end of day

Problem is we need to support multiple versions concurrently so introducing a system
For that

nice... ok thank you. looking forward to it

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we've release support for terraform 0.12 in geodesic

@Josh Larsen ☝️

See https://github.com/cloudposse/geodesic/pull/484

TL;DR:

and add use terraform 0.12 in your .envrc

to support 0.11 as well

do apk add --update terraform_0.11@cloudposse and add use terraform 0.12 in the .envrc

if you only care about 0.12 and not 0.11

awesome!

you can skip the brouhaha with installing terraform_0.x packages