Tiny CentOS 5.5 32 bit (i386)

From WBITT's Cooker!

Based on my previous (unfinished) article on creating a Tiny CentOS distribution, I have created this article. This one is finished (almost).

As I mentioned earlier. The idea is to have an absolute minimum number of packages. The driving force behind this thought is the latest RedHat Virtualization solution, RHEV, or, RedHat Enterprise Virtualization. RHEV is a slim/cut down version of RHEL 6, working as a KVM Hypervisor, with a very small install foot-print. I noticed that it is a similar concept as Citrix XEN Server. So, I wanted to see, if I can be successful in creating a similar product, based on CentOS 5.5. Notice that the procedure explained below DOES NOT contain libvirt, as yet. This is only because I was first interested in creating a distribution as small as possible. Since I have included yum in it, I (and you) can add any other RPM based package to it, without a problem. In coming days however, I will release a (so called) hypervisor version, InshaAllah (God Willing).

CENTOS/RHEL already has a @core group (option), which can be used in the kickstart based installation. Even that takes up considerable space and installs CUPS, SENDMAIL and a lot of other un-necessary packages.

Since I wanted to create a very small list of RPMS. I came up with a plan. I started with kernel, and kept trying to install the related RPMS in a temporary directory using RPM. I continued including missing files (RPMS), which were being reported by RPM as required dependencies. When all dependencies got resolved, I believed I had the desired minimal file list.

When I completed the basic minimal list, I added ssh-server, wget and yum to it. I further added the following: grub (boot loader), openssh-clients (for ssh, scp, sftp, etc), and vim-minimal (editor).

That would essentially make it a working server installation/distribution. Anything else can be added through "yum". The packages size is 108 RPM files (CENTOS), and 124 MB in total.

Note that I (generated and) tested this on a KVM based VM. This list does not include kernel-xen. You should add kernel-xen RPM to the rpm list, if you intend to use it either as XEN host, or XEN VM.

Preparation

Build Host

The buildhost is actually a CentOS 5.5 32 bit Virtual Machine running inside a Fedora 14 physical host. It is installed with the minimal installation available with default CENTOS installer. It has additional packages installed on it, which are:

[root@buildhost ~]# yum -y install anaconda anaconda-runtime mkisofs cdrecord

The BuildHost has only 512 MB Virtual Memory, and 2GB Virtual Disk. We basically do not need much disk space on the build host. (See the point below.)

The BuildHost (VM) has the IP: 192.168.122.94, on its eth0 interface.

Physical Host

The physical host is a Fedora 14 machine, with 4 GB RAM, and 100+ GB of free disk space.

The disk has a directory /data/cdimages , which hosts various ISO images of different OS, I have. This directory has the following layout (only the part interesting to us is shown below).

[root@fedora14 cdimages]# tree -d
.
├── CentOS-5.5-i386
│   ├── CentOS
│   ├── images
│   │   ├── pxeboot
│   │   └── xen
│   ├── isolinux
│   ├── NOTES
│   └── repodata
└── CentOS-5.5-i386-tiny

As you would notice, the /data/cdimages/CentOS-5.5-i386 is the full DVD copied in this directory. If you cannot afford to download full DVD, (for perfectly understandable reasons), you can download the packages, directly from the CENTOS website. The method to do so, is already mentioned here: http://cooker.wbitt.com/index.php/CENTOS_Server_CD_project#Creating_the_.22core.22_install-tree_from_a_http_site

The /data/cdimages/CentOS-5.5-i386-tiny directory shown above, is an empty directory. It is possible that you do not have this directory created at this moment. We can create this directory at a later stage.

The directory /data/cdimages on the physical host, is made available as an NFS writeable share to the 192.168.122.0/24 network. As following:

[root@fedora14 cdimages]# cat /etc/exports
/data/cdimages 192.168.122.0/255.255.255.0(rw,no_root_squash).
[root@fedora14 cdimages]# 

This is a good method to save space, both on the physical host and on the VMs. That means, you don't have to "fill-up" your build host (VM) will all the DVD/RPM files and ISO images. So they don't need large virtual disks for it. All of the work, can be performed, when we mount this directory /data/cdimages, from the physical host, to the buildhost VM.

The physical host has the IP: 192.168.122.1 , on the virbr0 interface. It may (or may not) have any IP on it's eth0 interface, which is irrelevant to this text.

I used the following two line script to test-install the RPMs.

[root@buildhost tmp]# cat testrun.sh 
#!/bin/bash
rpm --initdb --dbpath /tmp/RPMtest/ 
rpm --test --dbpath /tmp/RPMtest/ -ivh /tmp/rpms/*.rpm
[root@buildhost rpms]# 

Here are the basic stats:

Total packages and size of the RPMs alone:

[root@buildhost tmp]# ls -l /mnt/cdimages/CentOS-5.5-i386-tiny/CentOS/ | wc -l
110

Actually 108 packages. (Need to exclude . and .. directories from the list above)

[root@buildhost tmp]# du -sh /mnt/cdimages/CentOS-5.5-i386-tiny/CentOS/ 
124M	/mnt/cdimages/CentOS-5.5-i386-tiny/CentOS/

Includes ssh-server, wget and yum:

[root@vm2 centos-micro]# ls -1 | sort
audit-libs-1.7.17-3.el5.x86_64.rpm
basesystem-8.0-5.1.1.el5.centos.noarch.rpm
bash-3.2-24.el5.x86_64.rpm
binutils-2.17.50.0.6-14.el5.x86_64.rpm
bzip2-libs-1.0.3-4.el5_2.x86_64.rpm
centos-release-5-5.el5.centos.x86_64.rpm
centos-release-notes-5.5-0.x86_64.rpm
chkconfig-1.3.30.2-2.el5.x86_64.rpm
coreutils-5.97-23.el5_4.2.x86_64.rpm
cpio-2.6-23.el5_4.1.x86_64.rpm
cracklib-2.8.9-3.3.x86_64.rpm
cracklib-dicts-2.8.9-3.3.x86_64.rpm
crontabs-1.10-8.noarch.rpm
db4-4.3.29-10.el5.x86_64.rpm
device-mapper-1.02.39-1.el5.x86_64.rpm
device-mapper-event-1.02.39-1.el5.x86_64.rpm
device-mapper-multipath-0.4.7-34.el5.x86_64.rpm
dmraid-1.0.0.rc13-63.el5.x86_64.rpm
dmraid-events-1.0.0.rc13-63.el5.x86_64.rpm
e2fsprogs-1.39-23.el5.x86_64.rpm
e2fsprogs-libs-1.39-23.el5.x86_64.rpm
elfutils-libelf-0.137-3.el5.x86_64.rpm
ethtool-6-4.el5.x86_64.rpm
expat-1.95.8-8.3.el5_4.2.x86_64.rpm
filesystem-2.4.0-3.el5.x86_64.rpm
findutils-4.2.27-6.el5.x86_64.rpm
fipscheck-1.2.0-1.el5.x86_64.rpm
fipscheck-lib-1.2.0-1.el5.x86_64.rpm
gawk-3.1.5-14.el5.x86_64.rpm
gdbm-1.8.0-26.2.1.x86_64.rpm
glib2-2.12.3-4.el5_3.1.x86_64.rpm
glibc-2.5-49.x86_64.rpm
glibc-common-2.5-49.x86_64.rpm
grep-2.5.1-55.el5.x86_64.rpm
gzip-1.3.5-11.el5.centos.1.x86_64.rpm
hmaccalc-0.9.6-3.el5.x86_64.rpm
info-4.8-14.el5.x86_64.rpm
initscripts-8.45.30-2.el5.centos.x86_64.rpm
iproute-2.6.18-11.el5.x86_64.rpm
iputils-20020927-46.el5.x86_64.rpm
kernel-2.6.18-194.el5.x86_64.rpm
keyutils-libs-1.2-1.el5.x86_64.rpm
kpartx-0.4.7-34.el5.x86_64.rpm
krb5-libs-1.6.1-36.el5_4.1.x86_64.rpm
less-436-2.el5.x86_64.rpm
libacl-2.2.39-6.el5.x86_64.rpm
libattr-2.4.32-1.1.x86_64.rpm
libcap-1.10-26.x86_64.rpm
libgcc-4.1.2-48.el5.x86_64.rpm
libselinux-1.33.4-5.5.el5.x86_64.rpm
libsepol-1.15.2-3.el5.x86_64.rpm
libstdc++-4.1.2-48.el5.x86_64.rpm
libsysfs-2.0.0-6.x86_64.rpm
libtermcap-2.0.8-46.1.x86_64.rpm
libxml2-2.6.26-2.1.2.8.x86_64.rpm
logrotate-3.7.4-9.x86_64.rpm
lvm2-2.02.56-8.el5.x86_64.rpm
m2crypto-0.16-6.el5.6.x86_64.rpm
MAKEDEV-3.23-1.2.x86_64.rpm
mcstrans-0.2.11-3.el5.x86_64.rpm
mingetty-1.07-5.2.2.x86_64.rpm
mkinitrd-5.1.19.6-61.x86_64.rpm
mktemp-1.5-23.2.2.x86_64.rpm
module-init-tools-3.3-0.pre3.1.60.el5.x86_64.rpm
nash-5.1.19.6-61.x86_64.rpm
ncurses-5.5-24.20060715.x86_64.rpm
net-tools-1.60-81.el5.x86_64.rpm
nspr-4.7.6-1.el5_4.x86_64.rpm
nss-3.12.3.99.3-1.el5.centos.2.x86_64.rpm
openssh-4.3p2-41.el5.x86_64.rpm
openssh-server-4.3p2-41.el5.x86_64.rpm
openssl-0.9.8e-12.el5_4.6.x86_64.rpm
pam-0.99.6.2-6.el5_4.1.x86_64.rpm
pcre-6.6-2.el5_1.7.x86_64.rpm
popt-1.10.2.3-18.el5.x86_64.rpm
procps-3.2.7-16.el5.x86_64.rpm
psmisc-22.2-7.x86_64.rpm
python-2.4.3-27.el5.x86_64.rpm
python-elementtree-1.2.6-5.x86_64.rpm
python-iniparse-0.2.3-4.el5.noarch.rpm
python-sqlite-1.1.7-1.2.1.x86_64.rpm
python-urlgrabber-3.1.0-5.el5.noarch.rpm
readline-5.1-3.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm-4.4.2.3-18.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm-libs-4.4.2.3-18.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm-python-4.4.2.3-18.el5.x86_64.rpm
sed-4.1.5-5.fc6.x86_64.rpm
setup-2.5.58-7.el5.noarch.rpm
sgpio-1.2.0_10-2.el5.x86_64.rpm
shadow-utils-4.0.17-15.el5.x86_64.rpm
sqlite-3.3.6-5.x86_64.rpm
sysklogd-1.4.1-46.el5.x86_64.rpm
SysVinit-2.86-15.el5.x86_64.rpm
tar-1.15.1-30.el5.x86_64.rpm
tcp_wrappers-7.6-40.7.el5.x86_64.rpm
termcap-5.5-1.20060701.1.noarch.rpm
testrun.sh
tzdata-2010e-1.el5.noarch.rpm
udev-095-14.21.el5.x86_64.rpm
util-linux-2.13-0.52.el5_4.1.x86_64.rpm
wget-1.11.4-2.el5_4.1.x86_64.rpm
yum-3.2.22-26.el5.centos.noarch.rpm
yum-fastestmirror-1.1.16-14.el5.centos.1.noarch.rpm
yum-metadata-parser-1.1.2-3.el5.centos.x86_64.rpm
zlib-1.2.3-3.x86_64.rpm
[root@vm2 centos-micro]#