Google Cloud Platform Integration

[nomadicGopher]

Creating a feature request

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe:

• I want to use Diet Pi to host a server on Google Cloud Platform's Compute Engine (e# virtual machine). After doing the manual installation which requires a fresh install of debian, I download and run the install script. Although in the process diet pi removes all pre-existing software packages, some of which are required by Google to manage their VM instances (Google Cloud SDK). In addition, I am not able to SSH into the VM at all because it looks like the expected user was deleted. (If the host name changes that would probably also cause an issue)

Describe the solution you'd like:

• I'm thinking that if we add Google's required packages to a whitelist of packages to ignore if they are already installed, that should work.
• For the pre-existing users, during the installation script, an option can be given to keep or remove all/select pre-existing users and SSH keys.
• the same applies for the host name, I need to double check to see if the option is given to retain the existing host name.

[MichaIng]

Can you share a list of packages which are definitely required?

There is a dietpi.txt option to add an SSH key for the root user. We actually plan to remove the dietpi user as well, and instead allow to create a custom login user at first boot, which could then imply the option to add an SSH key for it. However, for first login, root is required anyway, and SSH should work with root user + password, isn't it?

The dietpi-installer is currently not designed or aimed to pre-configure an image, but to create a minimal system without any customisation. These are to be added via dietpi.txt or manually after first boot instead, which implies custom login users and the hostname. We could think of adding customisation options to dietpi-imager, but that's an entirely different and large topic, to be handled correctly as well by first boot scripts etc. For now I'd concentrate on adding everything that DietPi can boot on GCP until the default local + SSH login abilities, leaving SSH key and hostname to be done via dietpi.txt as it is now.

And of course we can create images for GCP so that it's not required to flash Debian first and run dietpi-installer 🙂.

[nomadicGopher]

A Custom Image appears to be their recommended method. Below are the relevant packages that i see after a fresh install.

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Google-Cloud-SDK

Required Packages

• google-cloud-packages-archive-keyring 1.2-475325068 all Contains GPG signing key for Google Cloud Packages
• google-cloud-sdk 402.0.0-0 all Utilities for the Google Cloud Platform
• google-compute-engine 1:20220211.00-g1 all Google Compute Engine guest environment.
• google-compute-engine-oslogin 1:20220714.00-g1+deb11 amd64 Google Compute Engine OS Login
• google-guest-agent 1:20220713.00-g1 amd64 Google Compute Engine Guest Agent
• google-osconfig-agent 1:20220824.00-g1 amd64 Google Compute Engine OSConfig Agent

Questionable Packages

• grub-cloud-amd64 0.0.5 amd64 GRand Unified Bootloader (cloud setup)
• linux-image-5.10.0-18-cloud-amd64 5.10.140-1 amd64 Linux 5.10 for x86-64 cloud (signed)
• linux-image-cloud-amd64 5.10.140-1 amd64 Linux for x86-64 cloud (meta-package)

APT Sources

• Get:1 http://packages.cloud.google.com/apt cloud-sdk-bullseye InRelease [6781 B]
• Get:2 http://packages.cloud.google.com/apt google-cloud-packages-archive-keyring-bullseye InRelease [5557 B]
• Get:3 http://packages.cloud.google.com/apt google-compute-engine-bullseye-stable InRelease [5533 B]
• Get:8 http://packages.cloud.google.com/apt cloud-sdk-bullseye/main amd64 Packages [193 kB]
• Get:9 http://packages.cloud.google.com/apt google-cloud-packages-archive-keyring-bullseye/main amd64 Packages [389 B]
• Get:10 http://packages.cloud.google.com/apt google-compute-engine-bullseye-stable/main amd64 Packages [1661 B]

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*I found Packer that if i can find the time would like to attempt bootstrapping a GCP Image.