Bootstrap a centos install to use in a chroot or vm
dtc_install_centos <install root> <yum environment>
This shell script is part of the dtc-xen package, generally to be used by the dtc panel to install a new a Xen VPS server. This script is called by dtc_reinstall_os when the user chooses to install the CentOS operating system.
How it works: it generates a temporary yum configuration in the yum environment directory, that directs yum to act inside the install root instead of in the base system; then it kindly requests yum to install the basesystem, centos-release and yum packages onto it. Yum then uses the configuration to download the required (usually, security-updated) packages and then perform the RPM installation process under the install root.
It requires both RPM and yum. It does work under Debian (it was developed in Ubuntu first). It should also work on RPM-based systems without destroying the system-wide RPM and yum configurations.
<install root>
Target directory where CentOS will be deployed. Must exist beforehand.
<yum environment>
Directory where yum will store the repository manifests and configuration. Will be automatically created. Cached RPMs and manifests will be left, as usual, in a directory var/cache/yum inside the install root.
dtc_install_centos /root/yum /xen/13
This will setup the operating system in /xen/13, with the CentOS configuration folder in /root/yum.
It's limited to CentOS 5 at the moment.
It must be run as root.
Under some circumstances, the installation process itself may kill processes running on the host machine. The chroot yum does should be sufficient to avoid this, but we haven't been able, yet, to ascertain why this fails sometimes.
This documentation describes dtc_install_os version 0.3.1.
See http://www.gplhost.com/software-dtc-xen.html for updates.