On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 9:59 PM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
As we get ready to start publishing Cloud Images ( or rather images consumable in various virt platforms, including public and private clouds ) - it would be great to have a baseline package manifest worked out.
Nice to have.
What / how many images should we build. At this time we were thinking of doing :
CentOS-5 32bit minimal
CentOS-6 32bit minimal
CentOS-5 64bit minimal
CentOS-6 64bit minimal
CentOS-5 64bit LAMP
CentOS-6 64bit LAMP
A good starting point. I have been doing something similar - create a bunch of image templates
At present, we have 1. A portable desktop appliance - basically a LXDE desktop install that can be dd'd onto a 4GB pen drive. 2. Min. server with ssh and ntp enabled. 3. LAMP (PHP, Python, MySQL, postgreSQL) for web development platform. 4. Desktop KDE with KDM supporting XDMCP for a quick demo of remote desktop 5. Desktop with Qt SDK 6. Desktop with GTK SDK 7. Server with postfix+dovecot+roundcube for email server deployment 8. DB server (MySQL, postgreSQL) for production deployment.
The above is in a mix of CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu base. Whenever anyone needs a pristine base, I copy the appropriate image file, boot it with virt-manager, change the network parameters, hostname etc. and hand it over to the developer/sysadmin.
What would be the minimal functional requirements people would expect from these images ? and what rpms should be installed ?
Take a look at the turnkeylinux.org appliances to see what others are doing.
Should root login be enabled or should we require people to go in via a 'centos' user.
I vote for the sudo approach. One can always do "sudo su -" as that user and would be equivalent to ssh root@somehost.
Should the image be self-updating, or should we have a post-login message that indicates outstanding updates ?
I vote for a post login message. The VM sysadmin has more control.
Keep us posted on the progress.
-- Arun Khan