Daniel Nashed's Blog

Behind the Scenes: Linux Install Fest Lab at Engage 2026

Bill, Matijn and I did three hands on sessions at Engage.
If you wondered how we have been doing it. Here is how this worked and it could be leveraged for own workshops.
Using cloud hosted servers can make a lot of sense. And it is very cost efficient.

Hetzner is a provider with a very modern and easy to use GUI. But they also have a great API to create and manage servers.
I am using them for years for DNUG and other events. And I would make it available for friends & family.

Recently Hetzner moved their separate DNS API into the central cloud API -->https://docs.hetzner.cloud/reference/cloud
I took this opportunity to implement most of this API in an existing Lotus Script class (Script Lib) and read the full inventory for a project to manage it from a Notes database.
Each database would match 1:1 a Hetzner project. We created a private network for the project and offered services like NFS based file mounts to provide workshop data.

The database is mainly designed for lab setups with the same server configuration used for all servers.
A profile document is used to define the type, size, location etc of the server.
What I also added is support for cloud.init configurations.

For our servers I just needed a host name. The e-mail address is used for an integrated mail workflow to notify users -- including sending them their server name and IP.
When creating a new server also a DNS record is created and also the IN-ARPA entry is set properly.

Creating a new server just takes a couple of seconds. In our case you have to wait a moment because we installed additional software, configured a NFS mount and rebooted the machine.

Because we did not expect everyone to register ahead of time thru the official Engage registration processing a mail flow from the Leap App to our database, I added a registration form to feed in new server requests directly.
The slides had a registration QR code to fill in the registration code.

This gave us a very flexible way to generate new servers on-the-fly.

The whole lab setup was done in a reusable way. So all the time spent on it wasn't just for this one conference.
And I will extend it over time for other use cases. The Lotus Script Lib is the core of the application, but with my additions also reading the inventory could be re-used in other areas.

This is a good example use case for a Notes database. It would probably have taking me much longer with most other approaches.

See some details below. I also added label support and to specify firewalls directly or via labels.
The could.init replaced my earlier Ansible scripting I used to customize servers after they are created.
But I also added a Ansible host list export and we used the same SSH key for all servers beside the management server which hosted the file shares.

-- Daniel

         

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