Creating a Red Hat Template with mach

Using the "mach" program you can easily create a minimal template for virtually any Red Hat OS. The following example creates a template for Centos 5.2 i386.

1. Install mach on the host node or your build server

   yum install mach

2. Edit /etc/mach/conf to use the OS version / architecture you want
3. Setup the chroot

   mach setup base

4. Setup any additional packages you want in the chroot

   mach yum install yum

edit /etc/mach/conf to use the centos i386 extras template run mach setup base mach yum install yum vim-minimal passwd ssh-clients openssh-server

1. Run the script below in the chroot directory (/var/lib/mach/roots/template-name)
2. Package the template into /vz/template/cache

   cd /var/lib/mach/roots/template-name

   tar czf /vz/template/cache/template-name.tar.gz .

3. At this point I create a "template" VE and do any other additional configuration inside the running VE, verify that it works, etc. Then I repackage it again.

Script to turn mach chroot into vz template:

Run these commands from /var/lib/mach/root/template. Replace the ROOT_PWD_HASH with your root password hash with your own hash if you want to set the password for the template. (otherwise, you can vzctl enter VEID and change the password).

OS=$(basename $(pwd))
alias rm=rm
sed -i -e /getty/d etc/inittab
sed -i -e /sbin\\/start_udev/d etc/rc.sysinit
sed -i -e 's/GSSAPIAuthentication yes/GSSAPIAuthentication no/g' etc/ssh/sshd_config
#sed -i -e "s/root:.:/root:ROOT_PWD_HASH:/g" etc/passwd
echo "PS1='[\u@\h \W]\$'" >> /etc/profile
rm etc/mtab
ln -s /proc/mounts etc/mtab
mknod dev/ptmx c 5 2
mkdir dev/pts
/sbin/MAKEDEV -d dev ttyp ptyp
mknod dev/null c 1 3
mknod dev/urandom c 1 9
mknod dev/tty c 5 0
mkdir -p var/lock/rpm
ln -s /etc/init.d /s
mkdir -p /var/lib/mach/roots/$OS/var/lib/yum/