On Mon, 2010-02-01 at 09:28 -0500, Michael H. Warfield wrote: > On Mon, 2010-02-01 at 11:35 +0100, Papp Tamás wrote: > > hi All, > > > Is there available any public howto about making templates for this distros? > > Making templates? Or creating containers from templates? The former is > highly non-trivial and should be done infrequently. The later is what > most of us really need and don't much more frequently. The lxc-fedora > and lxc-debian scripts really don't cut it for me. If they work > [...] > I hate sending people over there [OpenVZ] to just leach templates
I have been working on using the distributions normal package management/install tools as much as possible, to develop a recipe that results in a minimal install. This way the resulting filesystem is most like a normal system of that distro, and the recipe works on future versions instead of being stuck with the last time someone hand-crafted a template. I'm only doing this for openSUSE since that's the distro my production servers all use, and the recipe has many manual steps. But I've only got about 2 days of time into it so far and the results work. The resulting system launches sshd and once inside that system the normal package manager works to install whatever else you want (within the limits of any container, ie: things that need hardware access or hardware emulation, such as the recent X11 thread.) I now have a backup mirror copy of every one of my production servers up & running as an lxc container, thus freeing up the full hardware servers each of those clones used to require, allowing all those hardware servers to become production servers, doubling my capacity overnight and for free. http://en.opensuse.org/LXC Takes me about 1/2 an hour to set up each new container, assuming the host is already set up. The host only takes a few minutes assuming it's basically installed already and you're just adding lxc hosting support. So many steps still that have to be done manually and correctly, like devising the MAC to use for each virtual nic... I basically just cut & paste chunks of those commands from that page and then edit some of the files that are created with those cat commands. I haven't yet incorporated the latest ideas for stopping the containers gracefully from a host rc script. I do have a start-script there that at least starts up the containers during boot. As pain in the neck manual as this is, I would rather do this, and continue working on this approach and improve this process (and improve the tools this process relies on and the parts of the OS that currently need to be butchered in order to work in a container) than to rely on fixed hand-crafted container templates that just go obsolete in a couple months. A recipe that uses the systems normal software manager to install some pattern or group of packages, including maybe an lxc-fixup kind of package that maybe adds things into the systems startup/shutdown procedures in a well-integrated way rather than hacking existing system scripts, is a lot more self maintaining and worthwhile to invest effort working on. -- bkw ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Planet: dedicated and managed hosting, cloud storage, colocation Stay online with enterprise data centers and the best network in the business Choose flexible plans and management services without long-term contracts Personal 24x7 support from experience hosting pros just a phone call away. http://p.sf.net/sfu/theplanet-com _______________________________________________ Lxc-users mailing list Lxc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/lxc-users
