Jason's Braindump

How to make image?

For a Linux-based image to have full functionality in an OpenStack Compute cloud, there are a few requirements. For some of these, you can fulfill the requirements by installing the cloud-init package. Read this section before you create your own image to be sure that the image supports the OpenStack features that you plan to use.

  • Disk partitions and resize root partition on boot (cloud-init)

    When you create a Linux image, you must decide how to partition the disks. The choice of partition method can affect the resizing functionality, as described in the following sections.

    The size of the disk in a virtual machine image is determined when you initially create the image. However, OpenStack lets you launch instances with different size drives by specifying different flavors. For example, if your image was created with a 5 GB disk, and you launch an instance with a flavor of m1.small. The resulting virtual machine instance has, by default, a primary disk size of 20 GB. When the disk for an instance is resized up, zeros are just added to the end.

    Your image must be able to resize its partitions on boot to match the size requested by the user. Otherwise, after the instance boots, you must manually resize the partitions to access the additional storage to which you have access when the disk size associated with the flavor exceeds the disk size with which your image was created.

    Depending on your distribution, the simplest way to support this is to install in your image:

    • the cloud-init package
    • the cloud-utils package, which, on Ubuntu and Debian, also contains the growpart tool for extending partitions

    With these packages installed, the image performs the root partition resize on boot. For example, in the /etc/rc.local file.

    If you can install the cloud-init and cloud-utils packages, we recommend that when you create your images, you create a single ext3 or ext4 partition (not managed by LVM).

    Reference:

  • No hard-coded MAC address information

    You must remove the network persistence rules in the image because they cause the network interface in the instance to come up as an interface other than eth0. This is because your image has a record of the MAC address of the network interface card when it was first installed, and this MAC address is different each time the instance boots. You should alter the following files:

    • Replace /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules with an empty file (contains network persistence rules, including MAC address).
    • Replace /lib/udev/rules.d/75-persistent-net-generator.rules with an empty file (this generates the file above).
    • Remove the HWADDR line from /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 on Fedora-based images.

    Note: If you delete the network persistent rules files, you may get a udev kernel warning at boot time, which is why we recommend replacing them with empty files instead.

  • SSH server running

  • Disable firewall

    $ sudo ufw status
[sudo] password for linuxconfig:
Status: inactive

  • Access instance using ssh public key (cloud-init)

  • Process user data and other metadata (cloud-init)

  • Paravirtualized Xen support in Linux kernel (Xen hypervisor only with Linux kernel version < 3.0)

  • Manage the /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname by /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg

    preserve_hostame: false
# if you do not change /etc/hostname, it will be updated with the cloud
# provided hostname on each boot. If you make a change, then manual
# maintenance takes over, and cloud-init will not modify it.

    (via link)

    manage_etc_hosts: localhost
# cloud-init will generally own the 127.0.1.1 entry, and will update it to the
# hostname and fqdn on every boot. All other entries will be left as is.
# 'ping `hostname`' will ping 127.0.1.1

    (via link)

    Reference:

  • Delete the terminal command history

    $ sudo -i
# rm ~/.bash_history
# history -c
# exit
$ rm ~/.bash_history
$ history -c
$ exit

  • Wipe free disk space

  • Convert the format of image

    • convert .img to .qcow2
    qemu-img convert -f raw ubuntu.img -O qcow2 ubuntu.qcow2
    • convert .vdi to .qcow2
    qemu-img convert -f vdi ubuntu.vdi -O qcow2 ubuntu.qcow2

    Reference:

  • Packaging

    md5sum ubuntu.qcow2 > ubuntu.qcow2.md5
tar -czf ubuntu.qcow2.tar.gz ubuntu.qcow2 ubuntu.qcow2.md5

Reference

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