lxc / create image / debian squeeze

Written by
Walter Doekes
Published on 2016-09-14

I’m quite happy with our LXC environment on which I’ve got various Debian and Ubuntu build VMs so I can package backports and other fixes into nice .deb packages.

Today I needed an old Debian/Squeeze machine to build backports on.

Step one: check the lists.

$ lxc remote list
+-----------------+--------------------------+---------------+-----+-----+
|      NAME       |                   URL    |   PROTOCOL    | PUB | STC |
+-----------------+--------------------------+---------------+-----+-----+
| images          | https://images.linuxco...| simplestreams | YES | NO  |
+-----------------+--------------------------+---------------+-----+-----+
| local (default) | unix://                  | lxd           | NO  | YES |
+-----------------+--------------------------+---------------+-----+-----+
| ubuntu          | https://cloud-images.u.. | simplestreams | YES | YES |
+-----------------+--------------------------+---------------+-----+-----+
| ubuntu-daily    | https://cloud-images.u.. | simplestreams | YES | YES |
+-----------------+--------------------------+---------------+-----+-----+

$ lxc image list images:
+---------------------+--------------+-----+-------------+--------+--------+
|        ALIAS        | FINGERPRINT  | PUB | DESCRIPTION |  ARCH  | SIZE   |
+---------------------+--------------+-----+-------------+--------+--------+
| alpine/3.1 (3 more) | e63bc8abc9cf | yes | Alpine 3.1  | x86_64 | 2.32MB |
+---------------------+--------------+-----+-------------+--------+--------+
...

Lots of images. Any Squeeze in there?

$ lxc image list images: | grep -i squeeze
$ lxc image list local: | grep -i squeeze
$ lxc image list ubuntu: | grep -i squeeze
$ lxc image list ubuntu-daily: | grep -i squeeze

Nope. And the internet wasn’t too helpful either.

So, on to build a custom LXC image.

The Ubuntu Insight website was pretty helpful with the Manually building an image topic:

Generate a container filesystem. This entirely depends on the distribution you’re using. For Ubuntu and Debian, it would be by using debootstrap.

Configure anything that’s needed for the distribution to work properly in a container (if anything is needed).

Make a tarball of that container filesystem, optionally compress it.

Write a new metadata.yaml file based on the one described above.

Create another tarball containing that metadata.yaml file.

Import those two tarballs as a LXD image with:
lxc image import <metadata tarball> <rootfs tarball> --alias some-name

Apparently that first step is automated by the scripts in the LXC repository:

$ ls lxc/templates
lxc/templates$ ls *.in
lxc-alpine.in     lxc-cirros.in    lxc-openmandriva.in  lxc-slackware.in     Makefile.in
lxc-altlinux.in   lxc-debian.in    lxc-opensuse.in      lxc-sparclinux.in
lxc-archlinux.in  lxc-download.in  lxc-oracle.in        lxc-sshd.in
lxc-busybox.in    lxc-fedora.in    lxc-plamo.in         lxc-ubuntu-cloud.in
lxc-centos.in     lxc-gentoo.in    lxc-pld.in           lxc-ubuntu.in

Try it:

$ sudo bash lxc-debian.in --path=/home/walter/debian-squeeze \
    --arch=amd64 --release=squeeze \
    --mirror=http://archive.debian.org/debian \
    --security-mirror=http://archive.debian.org/debian
debootstrap is /usr/sbin/debootstrap
Invalid release squeeze, valid ones are: wheezy jessie stretch sid

I’m sure we can hack that a bit (I used git checkout 13dbc780), by:

fixing the paths (normally done by automake),
adding ‘squeeze’ in the appropriate places,
work around an issue where the nics count is not found.

--- lxc-debian.in 2016-09-14 13:43:07.739541126 +0200
+++ lxc-debian  2016-09-15 11:42:22.645638673 +0200
@@ -36,8 +36,8 @@ export GREP_OPTIONS=""

 MIRROR=${MIRROR:-http://httpredir.debian.org/debian}
 SECURITY_MIRROR=${SECURITY_MIRROR:-http://security.debian.org/}
-LOCALSTATEDIR="@LOCALSTATEDIR@"
-LXC_TEMPLATE_CONFIG="@LXCTEMPLATECONFIG@"
+LOCALSTATEDIR="/tmp/lxc-create-var"
+LXC_TEMPLATE_CONFIG="/tmp/lxc-create-config"
 # Allows the lxc-cache directory to be set by environment variable
 LXC_CACHE_PATH=${LXC_CACHE_PATH:-"$LOCALSTATEDIR/cache/lxc"}

@@ -314,7 +314,7 @@ cleanup()
 download_debian()
 {
     case "$release" in
-      wheezy)
+      squeeze|wheezy)
         init=sysvinit
         ;;
       *)
@@ -490,6 +490,7 @@ copy_configuration()
     # if there is exactly one veth network entry, make sure it has an
     # associated hwaddr.
     nics=$(grep -ce '^lxc\.network\.type[ \t]*=[ \t]*veth' "$path/config")
+    nics=0
     if [ "$nics" -eq 1 ]; then
         grep -q "^lxc.network.hwaddr" "$path/config" || sed -i -e "/^lxc\.network\.type[ \t]*=[ \t]*veth/a lxc.network.hwaddr = 00:16:3e:$(openssl rand -hex 3| sed 's/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//')" "$path/config"
     fi
@@ -753,7 +754,7 @@ fi

 current_release=$(wget "${MIRROR}/dists/stable/Release" -O - 2> /dev/null | head |awk '/^Codename: (.*)$/ { print $2; }')
 release=${release:-${current_release}}
-valid_releases=('wheezy' 'jessie' 'stretch' 'sid')
+valid_releases=('squeeze' 'wheezy' 'jessie' 'stretch' 'sid')
 if [[ ! "${valid_releases[*]}" =~ (^|[^[:alpha:]])$release([^[:alpha:]]|$) ]]; then
     echo "Invalid release ${release}, valid ones are: ${valid_releases[*]}"
     exit 1

Run it:

$ sudo bash lxc-debian --path=/home/walter/debian-squeeze \
    --arch=amd64 --release=squeeze \
    --mirror=http://archive.debian.org/debian \
    --security-mirror=http://archive.debian.org/debian
...

$ cd /home/walter/debian-squeeze
$ ls -l
total 13
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 165 sep 14 14:04 config
drwxr-xr-x 20 root root  21 sep 14 14:09 rootfs

This needs a metadata.yaml as described (on the same page mentioned earlier) under Image metadata.

The following is enough:

architecture: "amd64"
creation_date: 1473854884
properties:
  architecture: "amd64"
  description: "Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 (squeeze)"
  os: "debian"
  release: "squeeze"

Tar them together into a package and import it:

$ sudo tar zcf ../debian-squeeze.tar.gz metadata.yaml rootfs
$ lxc image import ../debian-squeeze.tar.gz
Transferring image: 100%
Image imported with fingerprint: 9bcaba951c4efabbd5ee32f74f01df567d7cb1c725cc67512283b0bb88ea7a91

$ lxc image alias create debian/squeeze 9bcaba951c4efabbd5ee32f74f01df567d7cb1c725cc67512283b0bb88ea7a91

Nice, it works. Do we have an image? Yes we do.

$ lxc image list local: | grep -i squeeze
| debian/squeeze | 9bcaba951c4e | no     | Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 (squeeze)                | x86_64 | 112.52MB | Sep 14, 2016 at 12:10pm (UTC) |

$ lxc launch debian/squeeze squeeze-builder
$ lxc exec squeeze-builder /bin/bash
root@squeeze-builder:~# cat /etc/issue.net
Debian GNU/Linux 6.0

It’s a bit bare, but it works. Some tweaks to /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname seemed enough. Time to get building!

lxc / create image / debian squeeze

lxc / create image / debian squeeze

Location

Links

OSSO B.V.