OpenSUSE template creation

Instructions manually create a minimal openSUSE 10.3 template.

Prerequisites

You need running openSUSE 10.3 installation.

Creating template

Preparing the base system

Run yast2 on your openSUSE 10.3 installation (this does not have to be your OpenVZ HN, you can prepare cache on one box and put it on your OpenVZ HN). Proceed with Software->Installation into directory option. It is assumed that this directory is current directory in following instructions (unless otherwise stated).

Create device nodes

I suggest creating all required nodes directly in the lib/udev/devices/, in that case you don't have to disable udev in startup scripts.

Execute the following commands to create device files:

mknod -m 666 lib/udev/devices/full c 1 7
mknod -m 600 lib/udev/devices/initctl p
mknod -m 666 lib/udev/devices/random c 1 8
mknod -m 444 lib/udev/devices/urandom c 1 9

Fix console redirect

Open etc/init.d/halt script and replace the following lines:

# Redirect our mesages to default console
test -n "$REDIRECT" && exec 0<> $REDIRECT 1>&0 2>&0

with this one (note || true at the end):

# Redirect our mesages to default console
test -n "$REDIRECT" && exec 0<> $REDIRECT 1>&0 2>&0 || true

The reason is that this redirect fails with permission denied in OpenVZ environment if $REDIRECT is console device (/dev/console). As a result, script terminates with error (because of set +e at the beginning) and the box is not stopped properly.

As an option, you can replace console device with regular file:

rm lib/udev/devices/console ; touch lib/udev/devices/console

Make df working

rm -f etc/mtab
ln -s /proc/mounts etc/mtab

Disable parallel startup of services

Set RUN_PARALLEL variable in <DIRINSTALL>/etc/sysconfig/boot to "no".

Disable boot.klog

For some reason, klogd hangs when tries to retrieve kernel log. You need to disable it. Simply delete etc/rc.d/boot.d/S*boot.klog

Create OS template

Create OS template cache by invoking the following command:

tar --numeric-owner -czf /vz/template/cache/opensuse-10.3-i386-default.tar.gz ./

Note: For Debian-based host you should put the archive inside /var/lib/vz/template/cache

startproc troubleshooting

It was noted that startproc under recent OpenVZ kernels sometimes fails with errors like startproc: cannot stat /proc/1128/exe: Permission denied. See http://openvz.org/pipermail/devel/2008-January/010278.html and follow-ups for workaround.