CENTOS Server CD project
From WBITT's Cooker!
Why Server CD?
Lately I thought of installing a XEN CENTOS 5.5 virtual machine on one of my servers out there. I needed the exploded tree of the ISO to be available. However, when I checked centos.org website, I noticed that they stopped distributing a "Single Server CD" after CENTOS 4. I could have downloaded a CENTOS 5.5 DVD image on the server but it was kind of un-desired / not practical for two reasons.
- The centos.org distributes DVD iso image through bit-torrent, and my server service provider does not allow P2P or torrent traffic.
- Even if I had one, I would have to download one big 4-5 GB file to my server. Whereas a few hundred MBs would do, if I want a text based "core" installation only.
So there arose an itch, and I decided to create a project to scratch that itch!
How would it work?
The idea is simple. I have a CENTOS 5.5 DVD already downloaded at home. I would install a virtual machine in XEN (at home) with minimal packages. Then I will take the list of packages from install.log, and remove all the packages from the main DVD repository (copied to a temp location), and update the repository metadata. The, make that new shrunk repository available through http and use the XEN installer again, to create yet another virtual machine, this time using the updated (shrunk / small) repository. If successful, I will either :
- Push the repository tarball to my XEN physical host on internet,
- Or, make a script to "wget" all the required packages from a CENTOS mirror, create a repo for the installer, and make that available through yum on that server.
Then, I can use that repo to install VMs. Since I will have the VM installed (core), and my VM will be connected to the internet through the XEN bridge on the physical host, I can always install more packages, directly from CENTOS repository.
This is infact the idea behind the netinstall.iso. However, I suspect that is is not suitable to be used to install XEN PV. ( may be wrong).
