[gentoo-dev] Gentoo inside vserver

[gentoo-dev] Gentoo inside vserver

[Jesper Fruergaard Andersen]

I have been running Gentoo inside a vserver for a long time (at least one 
year) and it has been working fine. I had to change it a bit to get it to 
boot right as many things do not need to be done in a vserver because they 
have already been taken care of by the root server. Whenever I have needed a 
new vserver with Gentoo I have just cloned one so I didn't have to adapt it 
to run inside a vserver again. However recently I did a clean build of gentoo 
inside a vserver and it took significantly more work to get it to work 
correctly, for example one thing I had to change was /sbin/rc.
Now I  know there are other people who run Gentoo inside vserver so I thing it 
would be nice if Gentoo supported this. Has anyone done some work on this? 
Othervise as I see it there are 2 things that need to be change for this to 
work. 
- The default package list can be reduced as many packages does not really 
make sense to have within a vserver. 
- baselayout has to be changed or a vserver profile has to use an alternative 
baselayout.
I guess one solution would be to simply create a vserver profile, but as 
vserver run on many architectures that would mean creating many profiles. 
Probably to much work for a relatively little change.
As I see it one way would be if you could somehow mask out some of the * in 
/etc/make.profile/packages and perhaps ad one for an other 
vserver-baselayout. What is needed in a vserver is an extended subset of a 
default profile and doing copy - modify will require more maintenance so that 
is probably not a good solution. The same goes for baselayout. Some is 
needed, a large part is not and a small part would need to be changed.
Any suggestions as to how this would best fit within Gentoo and is it 
something Gentoo wants to support?

-- 
Jesper
 22:19:30 up 19:06,  1 user,  load average: 0.88, 0.76, 0.93



--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo inside vserver

[Klavs Klavsen]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3394 bytes --]

On tor, 2003-11-06 at 12:49, Jesper Fruergaard Andersen wrote:
> I have been running Gentoo inside a vserver for a long time (at least one 
> year) and it has been working fine. I had to change it a bit to get it to 
> boot right as many things do not need to be done in a vserver because they 
> have already been taken care of by the root server. Whenever I have needed a 
> new vserver with Gentoo I have just cloned one so I didn't have to adapt it 
> to run inside a vserver again. However recently I did a clean build of gentoo 
> inside a vserver and it took significantly more work to get it to work 
> correctly, for example one thing I had to change was /sbin/rc.
> Now I  know there are other people who run Gentoo inside vserver so I thing it 
> would be nice if Gentoo supported this. Has anyone done some work on this? 
> Othervise as I see it there are 2 things that need to be change for this to 
> work. 
> - The default package list can be reduced as many packages does not really 
> make sense to have within a vserver. 
> - baselayout has to be changed or a vserver profile has to use an alternative 
> baselayout.
> I guess one solution would be to simply create a vserver profile, but as 
> vserver run on many architectures that would mean creating many profiles. 
> Probably to much work for a relatively little change.
> As I see it one way would be if you could somehow mask out some of the * in 
> /etc/make.profile/packages and perhaps ad one for an other 
> vserver-baselayout. What is needed in a vserver is an extended subset of a 
> default profile and doing copy - modify will require more maintenance so that 
> is probably not a good solution. The same goes for baselayout. Some is 
> needed, a large part is not and a small part would need to be changed.
> Any suggestions as to how this would best fit within Gentoo and is it 
> something Gentoo wants to support?

Have you seen the ebuild for the vserver tools I wrote? Feel free to
update the small patch, for the latest vserver utilities so they work
with gentoo's init system :)
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19230

I know I talked to a few gentoo'ers who also wanted to create a
vserver-baselayout and one of them did do some work on it.

There's also an ebuild for vserver-patched kernel-sources.

You can search through the old mailinglist, and find the guys, and their
email addr. 
http://www.google.com/search?hl=da&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=vserver+gentoo+support+site%3Awww.paul.sladen.org&btnG=Google-s%F8gning&lr=

IMHO, the best way, would be to write a patch for the baselayout
package, and add a vserver USE option to the baselayout package.

What I do with Gentoo vservers, is to create a
/etc/init.d/dummy-service.sh, and hardlink all the services that
shouldn't be run in a vserver, to this. This way all updates of services
etc. can get away with a depend net and other things, without breaking.
That's actually all that's needed for it to work perfectly inside
vserver AFAIK.

-- 
Regards,
Klavs Klavsen, GSEC - kl@vsen.dk - http://www.vsen.dk
PGP: 7E063C62/2873 188C 968E 600D D8F8  B8DA 3D3A 0B79 7E06 3C62
See my new managed CMS Hosting Service at http://www.VirkPaaNettet.dk

Working with Unix is like wrestling a worthy opponent. 
Working with windows is like attacking a small whining child 
who is carrying a .38.				

[-- Attachment #2: This is a digitally signed message part --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 189 bytes --]