[Lxc-users] Karmic/Lucid template howto

Mon Feb 1 14:28:22 UTC 2010

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
(lxc-fedora, yes, lxc-debian on Fedora, no) the containers are not
runable and lacking in a great deal of basic functionality, like sshd.
Creating a template, I usually start from a very generic machine (either
from a real machine or a base template) and add what I want, update it,
and clean it up.  Then I clone it off to make new machines I then fine
tune to specific purposes.

> I've found some, but I was still not successful.

I come from the OpenVZ world where I've been working with a lot of
containers and a lot of templates for many many years, including
creating my own.  This is where OpenVZ continues to shine above LXC and
will for some time to come.  It has a strong robust system for creating
a variety of templates from metadata and keeping those templates up to
date, but also a rich deep repository of pre-created templates for many
many distributions and releases.  Some of these are even contributed
back to them from other users and developers.  Here are the pre-created
templates I've downloaded from their project:

centos-4-x86_64.tar.gz        fedora-12-x86.tar.gz
centos-4-x86.tar.gz           fedora-9-x86_64.tar.gz
centos-5-x86_64-devel.tar.gz  fedora-9-x86.tar.gz
centos-5-x86_64.tar.gz        gentoo-openvz-x86-2008.11.30.tar.gz
centos-5-x86-devel.tar.gz     slackware-12.0-i386-minimal.tar.gz
centos-5-x86.tar.gz           suse-11.1-x86_64.tar.gz
debian-3.1-x86.tar.gz         suse-11.1-x86.tar.gz
debian-4.0-x86_64.tar.gz      ubuntu-7.10-x86_64.tar.gz
debian-4.0-x86.tar.gz         ubuntu-7.10-x86.tar.gz
debian-5.0-x86_64.tar.gz      ubuntu-8.04-x86_64.tar.gz
debian-5.0-x86.tar.gz         ubuntu-8.04-x86.tar.gz
fedora-10-x86_64.tar.gz       ubuntu-8.10-x86_64.tar.gz
fedora-10-x86.tar.gz          ubuntu-8.10-x86.tar.gz
fedora-11-x86_64.tar.gz       ubuntu-9.04-x86_64.tar.gz
fedora-11-x86.tar.gz          ubuntu-9.04-x86.tar.gz
fedora-12-x86_64.tar.gz

I haven't actually fired up containers based on ALL of these templates
(and there are more available) but I have done quite a few.

With relatively little effort (mostly killing udev and recreating some
tty device nods) these templates work like a charm with LXC.  Make a
directory for your container (I do all of mine under /srv/lxc), untar
the template in that directory and apply hacks (like "echo 0" >>
etc/udev/udev.conf" to kill udev) and it should at least start and you
can get to fine tuning it.

I hate sending people over there to just leach templates and I've worked
with OpenVZ for ages and that's a great project to get started into
containers if you are running on an older kernel but their precreated
templates are here:

http://download.openvz.org/template/precreated/

I doubt anyone here is interested in their meta-data (they're more than
a little out of date).  They do, however, have wiki pages on template
creation that are pretty informative and generic enough to be applicable
here.

> Thank you,
> 
> tamas
> 
> Ps.: I'm pretty new to LXC, so the simpler, the better:)
> 
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-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
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