Create your own appliance

An appliance is virtual disk containing an Openrating System (OS) of your choice, as well as your own application stack.

You can easily create your appliance in a few steps:

  • download the OS of your choice
  • launch a virtual machine (VM)from this OS
  • update all packages
  • prepare the system for the cloud
  • install your application stack

Download your OS

Here are some major OSes:

Install and  launch a VM

You must use a local hypervisor to install and launch a VM from your OS of your choice to follow next chapters. You can use Qemu or Virtualbox.

Update packages

You must use the installed package management tool.

For example, under Scientific Linux, you would use the following command:

# yum update

Prepare the OS for the cloud

N.B.: this step is not necessary if you downloaded a cloud ready image, like Ubuntu one from the link given in chapter « Download your OS« .

Necessary steps to prepare your OS for the cloud:

  • install « cloud-init » package
    # yum install epel-release
    # [ $? -eq 0 ] || (wget http://epel.mirror.net.in/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm &&  rpm -Uvh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm)
    # yum install cloud-init
    # chkconfig cloud-init on 
    # chkconfig cloud-init-local on
  • reset network configuration
    # echo "NOZEROCONF=yes" >> /etc /sysconfig/network
    # rm /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-ner.rules
    # touch /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
  • disable root password
    # dd if=/dev/random count=50|md5sum|passwd --stdin root

Install your software stack

You can now install your softwares.