Semi-Official Fedora 18 downloadable cloud images

[Juerg Haefliger]

Hi Matt,

> <http://mattdm.fedorapeople.org/cloud-images/>
>
> This is a basic Fedora 18 spin designed to work in OpenStack and other
> private cloud environments. It's configured with cloud-init so it will take
> advantage of ec2-compatible metadata services for provisioning ssh keys.
> That also currently creates an ec2-user account; we'll probably want to make
> that something generic by default in a future iteration. The root password
> is empty by default.
>
> These images were built using appliance-creator and the kickstart files from
>
>  http://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/cloud-kickstarts.git/tree/generic
>
> They include the final F18 release plus all relevant zero-day updates.
>
> Note that unlike the standard F18 install, this image has /tmp on disk
> rather than in tmpfs, since memory is usually at a premium.
>
> The raw.xz files are compressed raw images; they consist of 10GB of mostly
> zeros and will need to be uncompressed to use. The .qcow2 images are also
> compressed but can be used immediately by anything which (like OpenStack
> Glance) can use that format natively.

I'm the creator and current maintainer of the (unfortunately rather
old) Fedora 16 image in the HP cloud (www.hpcloud.com) which runs
OpenStack. I'm very much interested in leveraging Fedora-built images
so that I can get out of the business of building guest images for the
HP cloud :-)

I took your qcow2 64-bit image for a spin and identified the following
issues when running it in our environment:

1) The default username ec2-user is too Amazon centric. I don't know
what the greater implications are of changing the default user but I'd
rather see something generic like 'fedora'.

2) The console log is empty. It would be rather helpful to add
'console=ttyS0' for debugging potential boot issues.

3) There's no growroot initramfs script so the root partition doesn't
get automatically enlarged to consume the whole disk. I'm working on
creating the missing packages cloud-utils and cloud-initramfs-tools. I
have them ready for EPEL 6 but not yet Fedora because it uses GPT.

4) dnsdomainname returns 'localhost' when it should return 'novalocal'
in our environment. Quite frankly I don't know how the domainname is
retrieved and need to look into it.

5) The timezone is set to EST which doesn't necessarily match the
location of the VM. I think UTC would make more sense.

6) Is there a file with the image version or builddate somewhere in
the image? I couldn't find one but think it's a useful thing to have.


Do you think these could be addressed with a single generic image that
works both in EC2 and OpenStack, just like Canonical's Ubuntu images?
Let me know what you think and how I can help.

Also, would you (or the greater Fedora project in general) be
interested in a free account in the HP cloud? I think I should be able
to make that happen. Note that at the moment user's can't upload their
own images, they all have to be uploaded by HP (read me) until we make
the Glance API publicly available.

Regards
...Juerg



>
> --
> Matthew Miller  ☁☁☁  Fedora Cloud Architect  ☁☁☁  <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
> _______________________________________________
> cloud mailing list
> cloud at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/cloud