Fair enough ahah

How illegal is it to host and seed Anna’s Archive?

I really love all the 5+ years old articles about why systemd sucks.
It’s not perfect but it’s so much better than the plethora of different init methods Linux used to have. Also managing sysv init scripts sucked really bad.
It’s lightweight, most of it is optional, it’s declarative, it makes managing your systems much easier and it just works.

To provision VMs yes, to configure them I think Ansible works best. But you can call Ansible from Terraform.

You can use udev rules and systemd mount or AutoFs.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Udev https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd#systemd.mount_-_mounting

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Autofs

It was definitely a headache for me as well, but you need a guest agent (like vmwaretools or qemu-guest-agent), a cloud init ready template for the distro of your choice, a cloud init config file (network/user/vendor) and a custom SCSI/ide cloudinit cdrom mounted at boot on your VM. You also can find cloudinit logs on your VM to try and figure out what’s missing or what went wrong.