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New Official CentOS, Fedora and Scientific Linux images

We recently added Brightbox support to RedHat’s “cloud appliance builder” project BoxGrinder, which makes it easy to build customised rpm-based distro images.

We’ll be publishing a walk-through guide soon, but in the mean time we’re using BoxGrinder ourselves to automatically publish up-to-date CentOS, Scientific Linux and Fedora server images to our image library (in much the same way as we do with Ubuntu)

You can view the official images with the brightbox-images tool:

$ brightbox-images list --type=official 

 id         owner      type      created_on  status  size   name                                    
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 img-3rb1e  brightbox  official  2011-04-19  public  0      Blank disk image (i686)                 
 img-715uq  brightbox  official  2011-04-19  public  0      Blank disk image (x86_64)               
 img-adtke  brightbox  official  2011-07-20  public  0      Blank disk image (compat) (i686)        
 img-ztdma  brightbox  official  2011-07-20  public  0      Blank disk image (compat) (x86_64)      
 img-rm19n  brightbox  official  2012-07-04  public  5120   CentOS 6.2 server (i686)                
 img-ukwoi  brightbox  official  2012-07-04  public  5120   CentOS 6.2 server (x86_64)              
 img-t22r8  brightbox  official  2012-07-04  public  5125   Fedora 16 server (i686)                 
 img-sk61r  brightbox  official  2012-07-04  public  5125   Fedora 16 server (x86_64)               
 img-1okdf  brightbox  official  2010-11-19  public  20480  FreeBSD 8.1 minimal (i686)              
 img-aoubd  brightbox  official  2010-11-19  public  20480  FreeBSD 8.1 minimal (x86_64)            
 img-obf68  brightbox  official  2012-07-04  public  5120   Scientific Linux 6.2 server (i686)      
 img-hg6z2  brightbox  official  2012-07-04  public  5120   Scientific Linux 6.2 server (x86_64)    
 img-wwgbb  brightbox  official  2012-05-01  public  769    Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS server (i686)    
 img-alkg0  brightbox  official  2012-05-01  public  769    Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS server (x86_64)  
 img-ipb1z  brightbox  official  2012-05-01  public  769    Ubuntu Natty 11.04 server (i686)        
 img-bj33p  brightbox  official  2012-05-01  public  1025   Ubuntu Natty 11.04 server (x86_64)      
 img-57v0y  brightbox  official  2012-05-01  public  1025   Ubuntu Oneiric 11.10 server (i686)      
 img-hsxaq  brightbox  official  2012-05-01  public  1025   Ubuntu Oneiric 11.10 server (x86_64)    
 img-at0ha  brightbox  official  2012-04-26  public  1025   Ubuntu Precise 12.04 LTS server (i686)  
 img-9h5cv  brightbox  official  2012-04-26  public  1025   Ubuntu Precise 12.04 LTS server (x86_64)
 img-hnigl  brightbox  official  2012-03-14  public  20480  Windows 2008 Server R2 (x86_64)         
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The ssh user is brightbox as you can see by inspecting the image details with brightbox-images show:

$ brightbox-images show img-ukwoi

	    id: img-ukwoi
	  type: official
	 owner: brightbox
    created_at: 2012-07-04T10:03Z
	status: public
	  arch: x86_64
	  name: CentOS 6.2 server (x86_64)
   description: 
      username: brightbox
  virtual_size: 5120
     disk_size: 618
	public: true
compatibility_mode: false
      official: true
   ancestor_id: 
  licence_name:

You can create linux cloud servers from these images in the normal fashion, but unlike Ubuntu they will not automatically extend the disk partition to use all the available space. The spare space is available for use with additional partitions or LVM as required.

As well as the official images, the test account (acc-tqs4c) contains versions of these images that are built regularly every week. To list them, use the --show-all option with the account selector:

$ brightbox-images list --account=acc-tqs4c --show-all | grep '6\.2'

 id         owner      type      created_on  status  size   name                                         
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 img-du20e  acc-tqs4c  upload  2012-07-04  public  5120   CentOS 6.2 server (i686)                
 img-p3mxo  acc-tqs4c  upload  2012-07-04  public  5120   CentOS 6.2 server (x86_64)              
 img-wjaa8  acc-tqs4c  upload  2012-07-04  public  5120   Scientific Linux 6.2 server (i686)      
 img-rg60o  acc-tqs4c  upload  2012-07-04  public  5120   Scientific Linux 6.2 server (x86_64)    
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In addition, the test account contains our current versions of Fedora 17 and v5 Enterprise Linux derivatives. Testing has highlighted bugs in the distributions that stop these images working automatically on a cloud. We have bugs open upstream and hope to have these images available for you as soon as we can get the bugs fixed.

UPDATE: Fedora 17 images are now working perfectly thanks to the Fedora team fixing the cloud-init bug we reported!

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