Failverse

This guide will walk you through installing a custom linux distro to Rackspace Cloud Servers without the need of taring up a file system from a donor box. This particular guide is specific to openSuse, but the same method can be used to install other distros that support automated/remote install.

This process is entirely unsupported by Rackspace.

First, some documentation before we get started:
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Remote_installation
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Linuxrc

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I see complaints across twitter and the feedback page, as well as various blog posts about how the Rackspace Cloud doesn’t support this OS, or that OS. With the introduction of PV-Grub, you should be able to run nearly any OS you want – with a bit of work.

Keep in mind, this process is entirely unsupported by Rackspace. If your OS breaks on you, and you’re using some OS no one has heard of, they’ll be hard pressed to support it.

For this process you will need the following:

• A Tar archive of the filesystem for the OS you want to use, excluding /proc, /sys and /dev
• The New Cloud Server
• A good understanding of the OS you want to use.

For my example, I will be using Suse 11.3, it should work the same for other OSes. Let’s go ahead and get right into it.

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To compile kernel modules on a Cloud Server you need to complete the following steps, making sure to change the kernel version and directories where appropriate (–for example, 2.6.33.5-rscloud extracts to linux-2.6.33.5, whereas 2.6.35.4-rscloud extracts to 2.6.35.4-rscloud).

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For the longest time, cloud servers has been limited to the hypervisor’s seeded kernels. They were patched for exploits, and generally worked well – but some people require specific things in their kernel. While you could compile modules before, you were never allowed to touch the kernel itself.

However recently, PV-Grub became available as an option for Cloud Servers. This loads your grub loader and lets you use whatever kernel you feel like. In order to get it, all you need to do is request it in a ticket and give permission to restart the server. However before that, you will need to set up your kernel and a grub stub.

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There is currently no way to build a server on one account from an image on another account, at least not directly. This article will show you how to do it manually using a Cloud Files image. This only covers Linux servers, Windows users get no love! (Actually, once I’ve had a chance to test on Windows servers I’ll update this article as to whether it’s possible and what steps are required to do it.)

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The Rackspace Cloud allows you to save your images to Cloud Files, however currently your automated backups are still stored with server. Additionally you can only have a backup every day. What if you wanted one say, every 6 hours? You can achieve this with the API, curl and a bash script.

Below is the script, all you need to do is plug in your API key and your username. After that we just need to create a cron job to run it and we’re all good to go.

This Script Requires the Following:

• Awk
• cURL

These should all be installed by default, try running the script manually and making sure it doesn’t return any errors before setting up your cron job.

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The Ubuntu nfs-kernel-server package installs an init script in /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server that checks the kernel for a certain ksym to determine if the kernel has NFS support compiled in. Rackspace Cloud Servers use a custom kernel that does not include that particular ksym, however NFS functionality is fully supported.

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