Daniel Hokka Zakrisson wrote: > Roderick A. Anderson wrote: >> Daniel Hokka Zakrisson wrote: >>> Roderick A. Anderson wrote: >>>> Making another pass at some questions I've had over the years. I'm >>>> (re)looking at what distributions are used for the host and how to get >>>> other distributions in as guests. >>>> >>>> Excellent information on the web site but I haven't been able to find a >>>> few things. >>>> >>>> 1. Is it possible to build a non-Gentoo based guest template? >>>> >>>> Say I have a CentOS or Ubuntu guest on one system and want _VERY_ >>>> similar bunches of guests on other systems. Can I build a template of a >>>> guest to put somewhere (CD/DVD, USB thumb, network) and use as needed? >>> Sure. -m template is not at all Gentoo specific. >> I thought so but I found no examples. This is great. > > I tend to find that templates just get outdated, and I hate having to > upgrade things right after installing. I'm just impatient that way :-) I understand. For awhile I had some bandwidth issues that caused a build with -m yum and using vyum to be really slow. >>>> 2. If so, how do I create the template? >>>> >>>> Is it as simple as building a tarball of a (non-running) guest? >>> I'd use cpio as it does hardlinks correctly, but yes. >> If you have a minute or two could you refresh my memory. Hardlinks >> "correctly" how? Heck I'll dig into the man pages later and see if I >> can figure the nuances of tar verses cpio. > > Apparently this has changed and is no longer accurate. tar appears to > handle them fine as well. It used to be tar would store two copies of > the file, and extract them without regard to the fact that they were > hardlinks. Now that you mention it I thought I'd run across this. In a thread here of another list. > >>>> 3. And if I'm heading down a good path what would you say is the most >>>> stripped down distribution that could be used for the host? >>>> >>>> Yes disk space is cheap and I can and do turn off all the >>>> non-essential services but every time I check for updates there is a >>>> bunch of stuff I have to download because of the coarse granularity of >>>> the dependencies of so many packages. (Would that be a mouth full if I >>>> had to say it out loud?) >>> I run several CentOS systems with root filesystems <2GB, but to each >>> their own. >> Any tricks you can suggest on getting a minimal CentOS(/Linux-Vserver) >> host install? > > Easiest way? Install with a kickstart with a %packages containing > only the few things you want. To clean up after the fact, I usually > start with all the x86 binaries, yum remove libgcc.i?86 glibc.i?86 > then look through > rpm -qa --qf '%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}.%{ARCH} %{SIZE}\n' | sort -n -k 2 > > But if at all possible, I'd go down the kickstart route. Thanks. \\||/ Rod --