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FAQ

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General

Which operating systems are supported by BoxGrinder Build?

See the operating system plugins section on the plugins page. As of version 0.9.2 BoxGrinder Build supports cross operating system builds, allowing your host to produce an appliance based upon a different OS. For instance, it is possible to build a CentOS, RHEL or SL appliance using a Fedora host.

The supported approach is to use Fedora 15 or 16 to build your appliances, on which you may build any supported OS.

Which operating systems can I run BoxGrinder Build on?

Currently we only support Fedora for building appliances, but your appliance can have any supported OS. You need to have Fedora 15+ to build appliances with the latest BoxGrinder Build. We strongly encourange you to use latest available Fedora release.

You can build appliances of any supported OS using BoxGrinder on Fedora.

What is the location of supported Clouds in the world?

We have a nice map to visualize it!

How do I uninstall all of the BoxGrinder Build gems?

The easiest way to remove BoxGrinder is to simply use your package manager, for instance:

yum remove -y rubygem-boxgrinder-build rubygem-boxgrinder-core

How do I update BoxGrinder Build to the latest version?

For Fedora/RHEL/CentOS use YUM:

yum update 'rubygem-boxgrinder-*'

How can I use BoxGrinder Build without changing the user to root?

You can run boxgrinder-build as a normal non-root user, and BoxGrinder will preserve your local environment. Alternatively, you can run using plain sudo, which has some caveats.

When BoxGrinder is run a non-root user, any files produced will be owned by your local user, and plugins will be able to access your user's agents and environment such as ssh-agent and ssh-askpass.

Simply ensure the user can run sudo, and execute:

some-usr$ boxgrinder-build my.appl

For convenience you can grant your regular user access to execute BoxGrinder Build command without entering the password. To do this run visudo as root and add this line:

username        ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/boxgrinder-build

where username is your usual username.

How can I prevent GNOME Desktop mounting appliance partitions during builds?

You can disable Nautilius automounting using this command:

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/media_automount false

Alternatively you can use gconf-editor.

Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3...)

Why can't I find my attached EBS volume?

If you use Fedora 15+ or RHEL/CentOS 6+ AMIs built with BoxGrinder you need to search for /dev/xvdX instead of /dev/sdX. This is because we use a pv-grub AKI.

For example: if you mount an EBS volume on /dev/sdf, look for it under /dev/xvdf.

Why do I get 'Permission denied (publickey,gssapi-keyex,gssapi-with-mic)' when I try to log into a meta appliance instance?

You see this because the meta appliance installs the latest stable BoxGrinder Build release on boot, which prevents sshd from starting (and therefore prevents logins) until the update finishes. This can take several minutes depending upon the selected instance size.

Why can't I log into my AMI as root via SSH?

AMIs should be accessed over SSH using ec2-user rather than root. The ec2-user account has full sudo access without requiring a password (NOPASSWD).

Why does BoxGrinder Build not function properly on some Xen-based RHEL/CentOS 5 hosts like AWS AMIs?

At present, a bug in libguestfs results in only non-Xen kernels being looked for in /boot. You can work around this by installing a non-Xen kernel onto the AMI:

yum install kernel