Re: [vserver] Mix and match guest distributions

From: Roderick A. Anderson <raanders_at_cyber-office.net>
Date: Fri 15 Apr 2011 - 15:29:19 BST
Message-ID: <4DA8563F.1000404@cyber-office.net>

Daniel Hokka Zakrisson wrote:
> Roderick A. Anderson wrote:
>> Daniel Hokka Zakrisson wrote:
>>> Roderick A. Anderson wrote:
>>>> Making another pass at some questions I've had over the years. I'm
>>>> (re)looking at what distributions are used for the host and how to get
>>>> other distributions in as guests.
>>>>
>>>> Excellent information on the web site but I haven't been able to find a
>>>> few things.
>>>>
>>>> 1. Is it possible to build a non-Gentoo based guest template?
>>>>
>>>> Say I have a CentOS or Ubuntu guest on one system and want _VERY_
>>>> similar bunches of guests on other systems. Can I build a template of a
>>>> guest to put somewhere (CD/DVD, USB thumb, network) and use as needed?
>>> Sure. -m template is not at all Gentoo specific.
>> I thought so but I found no examples. This is great.
>
> I tend to find that templates just get outdated, and I hate having to
> upgrade things right after installing. I'm just impatient that way :-)

I understand. For awhile I had some bandwidth issues that caused a
build with -m yum and using vyum to be really slow.

>>>> 2. If so, how do I create the template?
>>>>
>>>> Is it as simple as building a tarball of a (non-running) guest?
>>> I'd use cpio as it does hardlinks correctly, but yes.
>> If you have a minute or two could you refresh my memory. Hardlinks
>> "correctly" how? Heck I'll dig into the man pages later and see if I
>> can figure the nuances of tar verses cpio.
>
> Apparently this has changed and is no longer accurate. tar appears to
> handle them fine as well. It used to be tar would store two copies of
> the file, and extract them without regard to the fact that they were
> hardlinks.

Now that you mention it I thought I'd run across this. In a thread here
of another list.

>
>>>> 3. And if I'm heading down a good path what would you say is the most
>>>> stripped down distribution that could be used for the host?
>>>>
>>>> Yes disk space is cheap and I can and do turn off all the
>>>> non-essential services but every time I check for updates there is a
>>>> bunch of stuff I have to download because of the coarse granularity of
>>>> the dependencies of so many packages. (Would that be a mouth full if I
>>>> had to say it out loud?)
>>> I run several CentOS systems with root filesystems <2GB, but to each
>>> their own.
>> Any tricks you can suggest on getting a minimal CentOS(/Linux-Vserver)
>> host install?
>
> Easiest way? Install with a kickstart with a %packages containing
> only the few things you want. To clean up after the fact, I usually
> start with all the x86 binaries, yum remove libgcc.i?86 glibc.i?86
> then look through
> rpm -qa --qf '%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}.%{ARCH} %{SIZE}\n' | sort -n -k 2
>
> But if at all possible, I'd go down the kickstart route.

Thanks.

\\||/
Rod

-- 
Received on Fri Apr 15 15:29:35 2011
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