Making template tools to work on x86 64

This article describes an (unofficial) hack to make OpenVZ template tools work on an x86_64 box.

There isn't much of a reason to run a 64bit container; however, there a memory management benefits to be had from running a 64bit hardware node. The problem is that the OpenVZ template tools only work on x86. The setx86_64 breaks distributions based on rpm 4.3.x which includes CentOS4/RHEL4. The steps I took to make this work with a RHEL5.1-x86_64 hardware node and the standard 32bit templates are as follows:

• Get and build Python 2.4.5 having exported CFLAGS="-m32" and LD_FLAGS="-m32" into /usr/local/python-2.4.5-32 by using --prefix=/usr/local/python-2.4.5-32 as an argument to configure
• Download ez_setup from http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall and run /usr/local/python-2.4.5-32/bin/python ez_setup.py (this will make some things easier)
• download and install ElementTree-1.2.6 (easy_install)
• download and install libxml2-python-2.6.9, you will need to have libxml-devel.i386 and libxslt-devel.i386 already installed (ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml2/python/)
• download and install urlgrabber-3.1.0 (http://linux.duke.edu/projects/urlgrabber/download/)
• /usr/local/python-2.4.5-32/bin/easy_install pysqlite, make sure you have sqlite-devel installed
• replace /usr/bin/python with /usr/local/python-2.4.5-32/bin/python in /usr/share/vzyum/yum-cli/yummain.py, /usr/share/vzyum/yum-cli/cli.py, /usr/share/vzyum/bin/yum
• modify /usr/share/vzpkg/functions change get_pythonver to run your custom version of python and not the system version