Category Archives: CentOS

Creating Live media image

Posted on by
Reply

If you are a GNU/Linux user, their is a high chance that you have used live media images i.e. live CD, live DVD or ISO. I was curious about  how live images are created and recently got a chance to do some hands on.

There are multiple tools available for creating live media. However I am going to use livecd-tools to create live ISO. livecd tools need kickstart files to create the images and we will use CentOS upstream kickstart files [1].

As a first step install livecd-tools [2]. I using CentOS Vagrant box to create live ISOs.

$ sudo yum install livecd-tools git -y
$ git clone https://github.com/CentOS/sig-core-livemedia
$ cd sig-core-livemedia/kickstarts

#You can use any one of the .cfg files in /sig-core-livemedia/kickstarts
$ livecd-creator --config <Kickstart file>

If you are new to kickstart files and want to know more about it refer the documentation: https://github.com/rhinstaller/pykickstart/blob/master/docs/kickstart-docs.rst

[1] https://github.com/CentOS/sig-core-livemedia

[2] https://github.com/rhinstaller/livecd-tools

Running System V init script in CentOS7

Posted on by
Reply

RHEL 7 and CentOS 7 moved to systemd from System V init facility.  So if we want to run a script at boot,  it is highly recommended that you should write a systemd unit file.  However to ease the transition to systemd, CentOS7 /RHEL7 offers a backward compatibility mode for init scripts.

In a System V init system you need to add an entry of the script to /etc/rc.local (or equivalent) and the script will be executed during boot at the end of multi user run level.

In CentOS7 /etc/rc.local is a symbolic link to /etc/rc.d/rc.local.

root@localhost ~]# ls -l /etc/rc.local 
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 13 Apr  4  2016 /etc/rc.local -> rc.d/rc.local

To enable the init compatibility mode, you need to make  /etc/rc.d/rc.local executable and then add the script to /etc/rc.local.

Here are the steps you need to perform to to start a script e.g. hello.sh during boot.

$ chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.local

#make the script executable
$ chmod +x hello.sh

#Make a entry in /etc/rc.local
$ cat /etc/rc.local
!/bin/bash
# THIS FILE IS ADDED FOR COMPATIBILITY PURPOSES
#
# It is highly advisable to create own systemd services or udev rules
# to run scripts during boot instead of using this file.
#
# In contrast to previous versions due to parallel execution during boot
# this script will NOT be run after all other services.
#
# Please note that you must run 'chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.local' to ensure
# that this script will be executed during boot.

touch /var/lock/subsys/local

/root/hello.sh

Reference : https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=48140

Installing Vagrant in CentOS7

Posted on by
2

Recently I started working on creating a Vagrant box[1]  for Atomic Developer Bundle project. For testing the Vagrant I wanted to use CentOS 7 with the KVM + Vagrant.

However yum install for Vagrant packages failed in CentOS as Vagrant packages are not available in CentOS7. However these are available through CentOS software collection SIG

Thanks to SCL(softwarecollections.org) community for making the Vagrant packages available.

So here are the steps that will install Vagrant with libvirt provider in CentOS7 machine.

$ sudo yum -y install centos-release-scl
$ sudo yum -y install sclo-vagrant1 qemu-kvm
$ sudo scl enable sclo-vagrant1 bash

# Start libvirtd
$ sudo systemctl start libvirtd

# Permanently enable libvirtd
$ sudo systemctl enable libvirtd

Refer documentation [2] of Vagrant project for more details.

[1] https://github.com/projectatomic/adb-atomic-developer-bundle

[2] https://www.vagrantup.com/

[2] https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/

Comments/Suggestions are welcome!

Bangalore CentOS Dojo, 2014

Posted on by
Reply

The first CentOS Dojo in India took place in Bangalore on 15th November(Saturday) 2014 at Red Hat Bangalore office. Red Hat had sponsored the event.

I was  a co-organizer of the Dojo along with Dominic and Karanbir Singh.  Around 90 people RSVPed  for the event but around 40 (mostly system administrators and new users) attended the event.

The First talk was by Aditya Patawari on “An introduction to Docker and Project Atomic”. The talk included a demo and introduced audience to docker and Atomic host. Most of the attendees had questions on docker as they had used or have heard about it. There were some questions about differences between CoreOS and Project Atomic. The slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/AdityaPatawari/docker-centosdojo. Overall this talk gave fair idea about Docker and Atomic project.

Second talk was “Be Secure with SELinux Gyan” by Rejy M Cyriac. This session about troubleshooting SELinux issues and introduction to creating custom SELinux policy modules.  Rejy made the talk interesting by distributing SELinux stickers to attendees who asked interesting questions or answered questions. Slides can be found here.

After these two talks we took a lunch break for around 1 hour.  During the lunch break we distributed the CentOS t shirts and got a chance to socialize with the attendees.

The first session post launch was “Scale out storage on CentOS using GlusterFS” by Raghavendra Talur. The talk introduced the audience to GlusterFS, important high level concepts and a demo was shown using packages from CentOS storage SIG. Slides can be found at slideshare.

The next session was “Network Debugging” by Jijesh Kalliyat. This talk covered all most all basic concepts/fundamental, network Diagnostic tools required to troubleshoot a network issue. Also  it included a demo of use Wireshark and Tcpdump to debug network issues. Slides are available here.

Before the next talk, we took break for some time and clicked some group pictures of all present for the Dojo.

The last session was on “Systemd on CentOS” by Saifi Khan. The talk covered a lot of areas e.g. comparison between SysVinit and systemd,  Concurrency at scale, how systemd is more scalable than other available init systems, some similarity of design principles with CoreOS and how it is suited better for Linux container technology. Saifi also talked about how systemd has saved his system from being unusable.  His liking for systemd was quite evident from the talk and enthusiasm.

Overall it was an awesome experience participating in the Dojo as it covered wide variety of topics which are important for deploying CentOS for various purposes.

Bangalore Dojo link: http://wiki.centos.org/Events/Dojo/Bangalore2014

Group Photo. You can see happy faces there 🙂

DSC07574_mod

Bangalore Dojo, 2014