[BlueOnyx:15378] Re: BlueOnyx Amazon AWS AMI

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Bill,

> I've been reviewing the list looking for information from anyone
> who might have successfully created an Amazon AMI using BlueOnyx.
> Anybody have any pointers?

Did someone mention the Amazon cloud? Wait, let me get the pitchfork,
the holy water and the cross. And a can of kerosene! :p

Jokes aside: I once had build 5107R/5108R images for Amazon EC2 in their
Ireland shard.

And I'd like to have those four or five weeks of my life back, as it was
just a very frustrating waste of time.

Let me start here: In an AMI you won't get BlueOnyx running, as Amazon
is basically running their own home-brew of Linux there. All the
services are either newer or older than on CentOS6 or SL6. Which doesn't
make it the least bit compatible.

With EC2 you can pick an image that is more suitable. When I started,
neither CentOS6 or SL6 images were available for EC2. At least not ones
from half way trustworthy sources.

The only acceptable choice back then was RHEL6, which involves license
fees to RedHat. AND which makes it impossible to build a BlueOnyx image
on it and then share it with others, as you'd loose the needed RedHat
subscription to be still able to fetch updates. You'd then have to get
that subscription outside of the Amazon framework yourself. All of that
is workable and manageable, but it's a bit of an extra hassle.

So I set out to build two SL6 images (one for i686 and one for X86_64).
Great idea. Required lots of familiarization with the EC2 environment
and its toolset. Eventually got it working and got BlueOnyx installed.
Some people started using it. And it died during the first Kernel update
via YUM. By now I know why, but that's of little consolation.

Eventually CentOS partnered with Amazon and they now provide official
and supported CentOS images in the Amazon Marketplace, which are
available for free. Which is ideal to install BlueOnyx into such an
instance. In theory ...

So I went back, used that and created a BlueOnyx 5108R image based on
CentOS6.

But guess what? The CentOS guys aren't playing nice. Their "official"
images have a flag set, which prevents you from making a modified
version of them publically available to others. The ONLY way to share it
with others is to make it "privately" available to selected other AMI
ID's. WTF is that shit? Hell, even the official RedHat images don't have
that flag, because RedHat aren't such greedy or stupid assholes like the
CentOS guys. CentOS simply doesn't want you to do forks or re-spins.
That is also why they exclude Revisor and sabotage Anaconda, so that
it's more difficult to roll up your own CentOS CDs. So you can't
distribute a re-spin of CentOS on Amazon, unless you roll it up yourself
from scratch. Which kinda defeats the open source purpose.

Hence my work for the Amazon cloud that was pretty much for naught yet
again. I made that image available to someone who was still interested
in using BlueOnyx in the Ireland shard and then deleted my Amazon
account. I'm done with that. There will be no more official BlueOnyx
images for the Amazon cloud. It's just too much hassle for no gain.

If you really want to pain yourself, get the official CentOS EC2 image,
set it up and configure it. Then get the BlueOnyx tarball installer and
try to set up BlueOnyx "on foot". Be sure to run "touch /etc/is_aws"
first, as the presence of that file will tell BlueOnyx that it runs in
the Amazon cloud and that it should handle the network configuration
accordingly.

The installer will complain about the missing /home partition. You can
either mount another image under /home, or you can edit the installer to
hack the check out that looks for /home being a separate partition.

Things you'll need to do for a successful install: Disable SELinux, make
sure quota is enabled and available for /home and that's basically it.

You'll have fun every time you start that instance, as it gets a new
private IP from DHCP. Which will be different from the last one you had.
So you'd need to re-IP all sites on every startup. Now base-network.mod
already has a constructor which takes care of that and it'll fix all
Vsite IP's on startup in the cloud.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber