1580594 - [image-generation] create baseline set of scripts for configuring windows workers

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Taskcluster :: Workers, task)

Description

[Miles Crabill [:miles]]

This bug covers creating scripts for configuring base images for Windows taskcluster workers.

Windows workers come in many flavors, from win2012 to win10. We need a baseline set of scripts that can be used, ideally across versions of windows.

The baseline work towards this goal is considered in-scope work for Monopacker (https://github.com/taskcluster/monopacker), and will consist of a set of scripts to be run on Windows workers in both AWS and GCP that configure a worker for production use.

Production worker Windows configuration should be offloaded to relops once we have a set of scripts suitable for their use case.

Comment 1

[Miles Crabill [:miles]]

I've taken a stab at this in https://github.com/taskcluster/monopacker/pull/3. This creates the generic_worker_aws_win2016 builder, which uses userdata and a set of powershell scripts to provision a Windows AMI.

I've run into some difficulties getting the entire installation script of generic-worker's win2016 worker type, adapted from https://github.com/taskcluster/generic-worker/blob/master/worker_types/win2016/userdata, to run.

First, the userdata configures the instance for winRM, which Packer uses to communicate.
Then we run the scripts in sysprep_aws, which succeed.
Then we run the scripts in generic-worker-windows, which fail.

WinRM outputs an error like this:

Error uploading ps script containing env vars: Error uploading file to $env:TEMP\winrmcp-2d089b65-d983-4c75-77a0-c7af7e5eddca.tmp: Couldn't create shell: http response error: 401 - invalid content type

We've merged that PR as-is. A minimal Windows AMI is easily possible, simply comment out the script directory for generic-worker-windows in the builder (https://github.com/taskcluster/monopacker/blob/master/builders/generic_worker_aws_win2016.yaml#L10).

This should provide a reasonable baseline for other people to work on Windows image generation scripts via monopacker.

Comment 2

[Miles Crabill [:miles]]

This has stalled because we have an existing process for configuring windows workers using OCC and are planning on continuing that work until relops adjusts their processes in the future.

In the meantime, we've laid the groundwork to make this possible in monopacker should someone want to.