[Users] Contributed CentOS 7 Public QA OS template available

[Scott Dowdle]

Greetings,

As you may already know, Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 on Tuesday (June 10th).  A while ago the two main CentOS developers got hired by Red Hat to work on CentOS because Red Hat is now the sponsor behind CentOS... like they are behind Fedora.  Anyway... the CentOS folks are working hard and fast to try to get CentOS 7 out ASAP... although they are going to keep their high release quality standards (it's as good as RHEL and as bad as RHEL, hehe).  Something new they are doing now is trying to be as transparent and public as possible.  They have placed their build system in the open, all of the package code in git, etc.

On June 13th CentOS announced that they have made the initial built of (most of) the rpm packages for CentOS 7.  On June 14th they announced the build-tree was fairly complete including a boot.iso that could be used for a network install.  Anyway, for the full story, read http://seven.centos.org/.

I've been busy working with the "CentOS 7 Public QA" release making an installable LiveDVD (check) and making an OpenVZ OS Template (check).  The later is what this email is about.  I have uploaded "centos-7-pubqa-20140615.tar.xz" (and .asc GPG sig file) to the OpenVZ contributed OS Templates directory.  A few notes:

1) CentOS 5 uses SysV init.  CentOS 6 uses Upstart basically in SysV compatibility mode.  CentOS 7 uses systemd.  If you create a container from an OS Template named centos-{something} I think it'll use the current CentOS config scripts provided by vzctl... which probably won't work because of the big change in init systems.  CentOS 7 is a LOT like the last few releases of Fedora that have also been systemd-based... so what I did on my OpenVZ host where I wanted to use this centos-7-pubqa-20140615.tar.xz contributed OS Template was... make a symlink in /vz/templace/cache/ named fedora-19-x86_64.tar.xz that points to centos-7-pubqa-20140615.tar.xz.  Then when I used vzctl to create the container, I told it to use the fedora19 OS template.  Of course if you already have an OS Template named fedora-19-x86_64.tar.* make the symlink named something else and refer to it appropriately.  I asked for a clarification from Kir on that... because maybe I'm imagining the issue.

2) The current CentOS 7 Public QA build-tree does not provide /etc/yum.repos.d/centos*.repo files.  Why?  Because the location of the current build system and all of the rpm packages is in a temporary place and won't be finalized until the final release comes out.  In my OS Template I created /etc/yum.repos.d/centos-7-public-qa-20140615.repo that refers to the *CURRENT* location of all of the packages.  Doing that makes yum work... and you can install and remove software as desired.  I'm sure they will be updating the build-tree and package location quite a bit between now and final release... so if the current location goes away or there is a newer build... you'll have to update the .repo file to point to wherever it needs to point.  It was working fine when I uploaded it. :)

3) RHEL7 is only offered in a 64bit flavor... and as a result... the OS Template is 64bit.  It will not run on a 32bit OpenVZ host node.  Don't even try it.  It won't hurt anything but you'll get an error and if you don't know what the issue is, you'll probably go to IRC and bug people there about it... which would be a waste of everyone's time... but if you do do that... hopefully we'll be able to tell you what the problem is.  The OS Template name I gave was already long enough and I didn't want to add x86_64 to it... because people would probably think there was a missing i686 build coming.  There isn't.

4) How did I make this OS Template?  It was rather simple.  I created a CentOS 7 KVM virtual machine installing from the network media currently available.  I did a minimal install.  Then I rsync'ed the contents of VM's virtual disks to an OpenVZ host node.  Then I made the minor changes needed... (not all but most) mentioned in the OpenVZ p2v wiki page.  Then I tar.xz'ed it up and plopped it in /vz/template/cache... made a container out of it... and it worked first attempt.  Then I cleaned it up by removing unneeded packages (grub2, kernel, firmware packages, unwanted services [firewalld, ipr*, etc], etc).  Then I added a few things I like (httpd, screen, mc, nano, links, etc).  Then I tested it.  Then I made a new OS Template by tar.xz'ing up the container's directory.  Then I made a new container out of the new OS Template and tested.  Works pretty darn well.  I'm sure there are some lingering dirs/files from packages I removed... and probably another handful or two of packages that could be removed to make it smaller but hey... it is ~98MB as a .tar.xz.  Installed it takes up slightly less than 700MB.  Not too bad for a first attempt.

If you have any comments or questions, just ask.  Enjoy!

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
704 Church Street
Belgrade, MT 59714
(406)388-0827 [home]
(406)994-3931 [work]