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Fedora Core 4 "from scratch"
You're a fan of [Fedora Linux]? You want to play around with Linux-Vserver's or use them in production? But you are new to this and want an easy way to (quickly) start with a running system?
Note: If you didn't want a VServer installation guide to Fedora Core 4, maybe you were searching for a guide like this: [The Perfect Setup - Fedora Core 4]
This quick-and-dirty guide is aimed to assist you in a plain and basic installation "from scratch" to a running VServer enabled host system with also one installed basic guest system. (written whilst installing a new LAN gateway server, so should really work)
What you need:
- The Fedora Core installation CDs (you can get them for example from the [Fedora Inode mirror in Austria])
- a bit of clue in server administration (to avoid another bot system in the net)
- working internet access (of course) to download remaining stuff
- enough time to work through this guide (and probably enough coffee and pizza ;-) )
What you don't need:
- Money (this guide is based on free available soures; donations to the developers are appreciated though)
- paid support tickets (they won't assist you - better look on the [Mailing List] or on the IRC channel)
Okay, let's start:
1. installing the host system (including VServer enabled kernel)
- boot from the FC4 CD and install a basic system (e.g. custom and "minimal" plus development tools; main services should always run on the guest system)
- IMPORTANT: do not activate SElinux (except you know exactly what you're doing!)
- Hint: It usually makes sense to create a '/vservers' partition to contain the guest systems - if you need more space, you can easily move that partition to a new, larger disc and prevent long downtimes
- enter the system and upgrade it to the latest updates (e.g. by using "yum -y upgrade")
- download the relevant ['vanilla' kernel source] used by the recent [stable release]
- download the kernel-patch from the latest [stable release] and apply it
- copy the latest config from your /boot directory to the kernel source tree and configure your VServer options:
- example (still do this even if you don't want to change anything to apply the VServer options into the configuration):
- cd /usr/src/linux-2.6.12.4
- cp /boot/config-2.6.13-1.1526_FC4 .config
- make menuconfig
- configure Linux VServer options, if necessary
- Note: if you don't change any option, this is probably the closest FC4 kernel - but also the biggest one ...
- finally: exit and save configuration
- important note: If you are using an x86_64 system do not forget to enable the IA32 emulation if you want to use 32bit guests on your system!
- build your new kernel and install it
- example (IMPORTANT: you have to use your relating boot /dev entry!):
- make bzImage && make modules && make modules_install && make install && grub-install /dev/XXX
- (you may want to take a cup of coffee and/or a pizza while this is running, depending on your hardware)
- important note: You may want to activate your VServer kernel in /boot/grub/grub.conf as your default kernel before doing the grub-install command so that it's loaded on reboot by default. To do this, just change the default=N to point to your VServer entry (starting with first entry beeing default=0; just count down then)
- (maybe one day an helpful guy will build and maintain a patched kernel rpm - for now, above is an alternate way)
- reboot your system and continue with
2. installing the vserver utilities on the host system
- download the latest util-vserver alpha release and (if applicable) also the latest patch from the latest [stable release] and apply the patch
- build and install the util-vserver tools to root (fits best into FC4 directory structure philosophy I think)
- important note: make sure you have installed dietlibc and beecrypt/-devel (strongly recommended by developer) by using e.g. "yum install -y dietlibc beecrypt-devel" or similar
- example:
- cd /usr/src/util-vserver-0.30.208
- ./configure --prefix=
- make && make install && make dist-install && make install-distribution
- test the installed system
- Note: we used the [testme.sh] script from Herbert to test the system
- example:
- replace the FC4 yum with a patched version
- as shown in the util-vserver source the actual yum (at least V2.4.0 and earlier) do not hoor the chroot sysem properly. Pre-2.4.0 ould work with a work-around within the vyum utility, actual 2.4.0 yum doesn't work with V 0.30.208 of util-vserver at all. So I have applied the (util-vserver sourced, recommended) patch to the actual 2.4.0 rpm package and uploaded his for public as [Binary] and [Source] rpm's. Recently this is the 2.4.0-0.fc4 sourced rpm, so it should work with any FC4 system.
- Installation example:
- start /etc/inid.d/vprocunhide and add it to boot scripts
- read Proc-Security for this issue
- /etc/inid.d/vprocunhide start
- chkconfig --add vprocunhide
- just to be on the save side: Set the "barrier" attribute to the "vservers" base directory:
- further information can be found on the alpha util-vserver page at "2.4 to 2.6 transition"
- setattr --barrier /vservers # your basedir to come here; default is as shown
- copy the GPG keys to the distribution directory of the utils (otherwise it will not be found on guest build time)
- cp -r /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/ /lib/util-vserver/distributions/fc4/pubkeys/
Now the FC4-vs2.0 host is ready to
3. build the first guest system
- prepare your vserver build command "on paper" by reading and understanding vserver XXX build --help
- set up your vserver using your prepared command, the following example builds one for testing purposes only
vserver test build -m yum --hostname=test.example --interface test0=eth0:192.168.0.1/24 -- -d fc4
- install the yum package (and maybe also some others, e.g. the ''openssh') into your guest host so you can easily work on with further installations from inside the guest
- vyum <vservername> -- install -y yum
- example: vyum test -- install yum
- for further packages to be installed from the host system use vyum <vservername> -- install <package> [<package> [<package> ...]]
- further packages could also be installed from within the guest using the yum install <package> [<package> [<package> ...]] command
- Caution (with openssh and pam) on FC4 guests: Due to the "audit" package pam authentication (also used with openssh) installs the options for using "pam_loginuid.so" into the /etc/pam.d/* files. Comment those out as this module will not load within a guest. This probably is also necessary on updates later on, if the configs get changed. This module will not be needed within a guest anyhow ....
- example commented line in /etc/pam.d/sshd:
- # session required pam_loginuid.so
After this steps you should have a running host system with a guest system into it. The guest system can be "booted" (started) by using the vserver <vservername> start command, shutdown (stop) is done by vserver <vservername> stop command (both issued on the host system).
For further issues like more configuration etc. please read through the further documentation.
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