Hi, I have made an Alpine Linux flavor with vserver kernel. This is a fairly minimal "livecd" that is supposed to be able run production vserver hosts. During boot it will install everything from scratch into tmpfs and run from there (so no runtime slowdowns caused by cdrom spinning up) Download from here (approx 40MB): http://www.alpinelinux.org/downloads.html (use vserver iso at the bottom) The idea is: * Boot cdrom (or bootable USB/CF) and configure network * Create partitions, filesystems on harddisks/raid array. * Mount disks on /vserver and add to fstab * Save config (aka. apkovl) to USB/CF * Create and run you vserver guests. This way you have the Host OS on separate media (cdrom/usb/cf) and the host config on an usb/cf. Benefit with this is that it goes very quick to set up a new vserver or restore a backup (just connect to the disk backend). Step by step instructions: * boot cdrom * log in as root * configure hostname and network by running: setup-alpine * configure your disk(s), mount as /vservers and add to /etc/fstab * optional: install and configure ntp client: apk add openntpd rc-update add ntpd && rc-service ntpd start * install and start util-vserver: apk add util-vserver rc-update add vprocunhide && rc-service vprocunhide start * make sure vservers marked as 'default' will start next reboot: rc-update add vservers.default * save configuration to usb memory for next reboot (make sure usb is inserted): lbu commit usb Now to set up a minimal test guest running Alpine: * run: setup-vs-guest guest1 It took me approx 3 minutes do all the above (except set up disks) in qemu and have a guest running, boot included. Note that you can also install applications from network (http) that will be available next reboot as well. Only thing you need to do is enable the apk cache and add an http repository. Here is an example how to do that to install shorewall: * make sure usb is mounted: mount /media/usb * Enable apk cache: mkdir /media/usb/cache ln -s /media/usb/cache /etc/apk/cache * Add http repository: echo "http://dl-3.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v1.10/packages/main" >> /etc/apk/repositories apk update # fetch the index * Install shorewall-shell: apk add shorewall-shell * make sure its still there for next reboot: lbu commit usb Cheers! -- Natanael Copa