[Users] More on making an OpenVZ template

[Kir Kolyshkin]

On 08/20/2011 12:18 AM, Sam Trenholme wrote:
> I am continuing the work of making a tiny OpenVZ template.  One
> discovery I have is that, for the OpenVZ tools to work, not only is it
> mandatory for the system to have the Bash shell, but also that /bin/sh
> has to be a symlink to Bash.  This is because the "vzctl" program
> prepends the contents of the Bash-only
> "/etc/vz/dists/scripts/functions" script to any script used by the
> container to configure the system, and there does not appear to be any
> way to configure a container to not use this Bash-only script.
>
> In other words, any OpenVZ template without /bin/sh being an alias for
> Bash can not be configured via the "vzctl" tools (nor the
> corresponding Proxmox/SolusVM/whataever tools that call "vzctl").
>
> This in mind, the next release of TinyVZ will include the Bash shell.
> I actually prefer Bash over Busybox's "ash" shell; I *really* miss the
> "!$" and "!*" shortcuts, as well as the "history" command, when using
> this minimal shell.

This is one way of doing things. The other way would be to rectify the
'/etc/dists/scripts/functions' to not be dependent on bash.

I am currently looking at it, so far I only found that it uses the 
'function' keyword
which is bashism. With that removed, it looks like it is working fine in 
either dash
or busybox sh.

I have committed the patch:
http://git.openvz.org/?p=vzctl;a=commit;h=f83b28435f582f2f74fb3267b89b061a551b32e2

And then a few more (to check it works in Debian without /bin/bash):
http://git.openvz.org/?p=vzctl;a=commit;h=a86beacde8c1fba4002eaf5bf48a535e7d46ffc0
http://git.openvz.org/?p=vzctl;a=commit;h=382f306cd0865bb4bcafc4f7a4b5cfe2f809296c

> Since this is an open source project I am not getting paid for, I have
> no timeline of when I will make another TinyVZ release, nor do I
> guarantee I will even make such a release.  Working on TinyVZ has
> taught me a lot about OpenVZ and hopefully is something that is
> useful.
>
> - Sam
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