Mailing List Archive

On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 11:39:43AM -0500, Matthew J. Harmon wrote:
> I'm building several small Xen virtuals to compartmentalize applications
> such as BIND, Apache, PostgreSQL, etc. I'm looking to build the virtuals
> with only the necessary libraries and packages.
>
> Any recommendations for how to go about this?

What distribution do you prefer?

I did a debootstrap of debian sarge from about a month ago and
without particularly trying to get it as small as possible, the
minimal install is a tar.bz2 of about 70MB.

I use that as the basis for my domUs, I have one domU run apt-proxy,
point the /etc/apt/sources.list at that apt-proxy and then use
apt-get as normal to add whatever extra packages are needed per
domU.

On Wed, 15 Jun 2005, Matthew J. Harmon wrote:

> I'm building several small Xen virtuals to compartmentalize applications
> such as BIND, Apache, PostgreSQL, etc. I'm looking to build the virtuals
> with only the necessary libraries and packages.
>
> Any recommendations for how to go about this?

Have you see linuxfromscratch.org?

I'd build a base LFS system, and then "duplicate" and specialize.. the
duplicate process may be better done in a copy-on-write manner to utilize
the same root image.. (not sure if Xen allows COW file systems....)

Just a thought..

Carl

- --

"There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary
and those that don't."

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Hello,
I have been doing this with ttylinux extremely effectively. So far I
have built functional 'mini' images of a bind-9.3.1 ttylinux os(about
35 megs), mysql-4.1.12 image(about 54 megs), and a few others. I
generally compile the application --all-static on the Dom0 and then
install to the ttylinux image with sort of a trick.
Example:

compile bind in a prefix e.g. - ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/bind-mini
make the program - make
mount your image - mount -o loop ttylinux.img /mnt/image-mount/
mkdir /mnt/image-mount/usr/local/bind-mini
cd /usr/local && ln -s /mnt/image-mount/usr/local/bind-mini ./
cd /path/to/bind/source/code
make install

this will install bind into the ttylinux image by looping it through the
symlink and will keep the prefix correct.

umount your image, boot the ttylinux domU, log in, and create your
named.conf, init scripts etc. Start bind. Have fun.

I have been building the apps on a CentOS-4 Dom0 and installing into
ttylinx DomU's, It's been working great for named-9.3.x/mysql-4.1.x thus
far.

If a need more details, contact me :)

Hope this helps.
John Fairbairn


> On Wed, 15 Jun 2005, Matthew J. Harmon wrote:
>
>> I'm building several small Xen virtuals to compartmentalize applications
>> such as BIND, Apache, PostgreSQL, etc. I'm looking to build the
>> virtuals
>> with only the necessary libraries and packages.
>>
>> Any recommendations for how to go about this?
>
> Have you see linuxfromscratch.org?
>
> I'd build a base LFS system, and then "duplicate" and specialize.. the
> duplicate process may be better done in a copy-on-write manner to utilize
> the same root image.. (not sure if Xen allows COW file systems....)
>
> Just a thought..
>
> Carl
>
> - --
>
> "There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary
> and those that don't."
>
> _______________________________________________
> Xen-users mailing list
> Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
> http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
>


--
In the game of life it takes a root prompt to really foul up.


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