[CentOS-virt] Package lists for Cloud images

Fri Oct 5 11:34:39 UTC 2012
Arun Khan <knura9 at gmail.com>

On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 9:59 PM, Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at 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 at 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