Converting JailTime.org templates for HyperVM
Well, after finally figuring out how to do this myself, I felt necessary that I shared this with others, so that people can easily do this on their own without having to feel their way through doing this on their own.
Note: Root access is required. This MUST be done on a server or VPS that allows mounting using the loop device, as this is needed for some of the steps.
For our example, we are going to demonstrate how to convert the debian image into a HyperVM-ready image. This can also be done on any other template provided by JailTime.org.
Firstly, we must download the image onto the machine we’re going to be doing the conversion on.
wget “http://jailtime.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?cache=cache&media=download%3Adebian64%3Adebian.4-0.64.20080709.img.tar.bz2″
After downloading the file, we are going to extract out the image. There will be a xen configuration file in the archive as well, but this can be ignored as HyperVM generates its own xen configuration file.
tar jxf debian.4-0.64.20080709.img.tar.bz2
Next, we will prepare a directory to mount the image file to, and mount it using the loop device.
mkdir /mnt/foo
mount -o loop /root/debian.4-0.64.img /mnt/foo
Now, to get to the very simple part. All we need to do now is tarball the image so that HyperVM can read it appropriately.
cd /mnt/foo
tar -czf /home/hypervm/xen/template/debian-4.0-x86_64-jailtime.tar.gz
Please note, when naming the templates, you MUST name the template in the following schema:
distro-version-arch-custom.tar.gz
This instructs HyperVM which configuration variables it must pass to xen, and which configuration HyperVM must choose to ensure that the VPS will boot successfully.
After that step, your template is ready for use.
Note: I have noticed that some of the jailtime.org templates lack running GeTTY on xvc0, which may prove to be a hassle for some users, especially if they make use of the HyperVM console login. If you want to enable this, add the following line into your /etc/inittab
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty -L xvc0 9600 vt100
Also ensure that the line containing tty1 is commented out, as this may cause conflicts.
Happy templating!
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