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Comment by op00to | Hacker News Reader

Snapshots are often used for deployment of systems. What happens if the snapshot you rely on as a base image gets lost?

Base images should be repeatable anyway using packer etc.

Even though this is a bit tricky on the hetzner cloud, because it requires the addition of a static route[1] to access the internet which isn't pushed by the DHCP, and I haven't been able to fully automate that in debians preseed for the life of me.

Yes it's offtopic, but that's one really frustrating thing. Maybe someone here has a solution.

1: https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/servers/iso-installation-gate...

cloud-init?

cloud-init does help us, once we have a working linux, but we can also bake the static route into a base image.

The problem is that preseed is a very minimal linux environment and either relies on DHCP to work, or to use the usual network config DHCP sets (address, netmask, gateway). Arbitrary routes are not a possibility there. And ways to run abitrary commands to just <ip r> something come after the network initialization, which fails in that setup. The same holds for the kernel network bootstrapping parameters, I haven't found a way to add an arbitrary route there yet.

And for some reason, kickstart is able to handle this with it's centos/RHEL base.

Create a new one?

If the base snapshot is gone, all future snapshots that rely on that snapshot may be invalid. Depends on exactly how snapshots are implemented. Are they a delta of the previous snapshot? Are they a full copy of the device?

Hetzner snapshots are fully independent disk images, nothing more, nothing less.

Thanks! $20 seems kinda fair then, I guess.

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