Installation on CentOS

Install CentOS 5

My CentOS 5 installation is a DVD install with only the "Desktop - GNOME" group selected.

On restart, a number of questions (timezone/security level/etc) are asked. At this stage set the "SELinux" option to disabled. If you skip this step, then simply modify the /etc/sysconfig/selinux file and disable selinux from there. You will need to reboot before this takes effect, but it's okay to wait until you have installed the kernel before doing this (just to save some time :)).

Add the repository

In order to install the necessary packages, you will have to add the repository containing them to your yum configuration. Paste the following in /etc/yum.repos.d/dhozac-vserver.repo

[dhozac-vserver]
name=Linux-VServer related packages for CentOS $releasever - $basearch
baseurl=http://rpm.hozac.com/dhozac/centos/$releasever/vserver/$basearch
gpgkey=http://rpm.hozac.com/conf/keys/RPM-DHOZAC-GPG-KEY

Update yum

Before you do anything else, update yum. If you don't, you'll have to sit through lots of "you're using a knackered version of yum. Wait 5 seconds" messages.

yum update yum

Which should pick the version from the dhozac repository.

Install the kernel

To install the kernel, run

yum install kernel

Double check the grub file to make sure it is the bootable kernel (/boot/grub/grub.conf). If all is okay we are ready to restart the server.

At this stage (before the reboot) I also modify the host's sshd_config file, so it doesn't listen to every interface on the server, which would block any guest's attempt to run sshd.

vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

and add the line "ListenAddress <host IP address>".

Install util-vserver

To install util-vserver, run

yum install util-vserver{,-core,-lib,-sysv,-build}

Post installation steps

Make certain /proc entries visible

/etc/init.d/vprocunhide start

All done!

Once your host is setup, you can start building guest systems.

CentOS specific tweaks

Optionally, the following may be run to increase the functionality of the guest once you've built it:

yum -y install yum vim-common vim-minimal vim-enhanced openssh-server openssh \
gcc gcc-c++ kernel-devel bison openssl-devel libtermcap-devel ncurses-devel \
lynx tar wget nmap bzip2 mysql mysql-devel passwd zip gzip less make

Split /etc/passwd into /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow:

pwconv

Then remove any lines which contain 'pam_loginuid.so' from /etc/pam.d/sshd, /etc/pam.d/login and /etc/pam.d/remote.

Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and change the line '#ListenAddress 0.0.0.0' to 'ListenAddress w.x.y.z' (where w.x.y.z is the IP allocated to the guest)

Create /etc/resolv.conf with the appropriate details.