I'm curious about how to manage and maintain an ISO library for operating systems like Ubuntu and Debian. Do you have any tools or systems in place that automatically update these ISOs in the background? Would love to hear how others handle this!
5 Answers
If you're looking to keep a VM template updated, using Packer could help a lot. For VM creation, consider tools like Cloud-init or Ansible, and you can just swap out ISOs now and then.
Updating ISOs isn’t usually a big deal for us. When a new version comes out, like the recent Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, we just add it to the library. I typically sort by date and grab the latest one I need.
You might want to consider mirroring the repositories to keep both the ISOs and the packages in sync. It's a straightforward way to manage updates without a lot of hassle.
What’s the need for constantly updating those ISOs? Seems like a lot of effort for something that doesn’t change that often.
We typically don't need to update our ISOs often. Our Windows ISO gets updated about once a year, and we refresh our RHEL ISO as needed, so it works pretty well for us.
It's more about convenience! I'm testing with multiple versions (22, 23, and 24) and currently, I have to manually download the latest LTS builds. It’d be great to have a system that auto-downloads and builds the ISOs with my SSH key included.