Monday, 5 December 2011

Virtual Center Template for Debian

When using a windows template, VMware's Virtual Center can help you customise the resulting virtual machine with a wizard, unfortunately it doesn't do this for Debian which happens to be my Linux distribution of choice.

To create the template I just installed a nice minimal installation onto a new VM, added the vmware tools, changed the VM to use paravirtual hardware then converted it to a template.

After each "Deploy from template" I simply run through the following:

It would be potential security risk to have all the VMs using the same SSH keys so I regenerate SSH keys for the VM with:

# rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host*


# dpkg-reconfigure openssh-server


Update packages

# apt-get update


# apt-get upgrade


Set the IP address (well it is likely to be a server) with:

# vi /etc/network/interfaces

Change host name as it isn't helpful to have duplicate host names due to the confusion it can cause me:

# vi /etc/hostname

Amend hosts file (to match the host name)

# vi /etc/hosts


Do a quick confidence reboot then go about installing the software onto the VM as usual to make it fit for the task you need it for.

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