OpenVZ setup procedure followed – January 6th, 2009
host machine – 1.5ghz Pentium 4 (i386), 1GB ram, 40GB hard disk drive
host os – CentOS 5.2
for more detailed installation information see: http://download.openvz.org/doc/OpenVZ-Users-Guide.pdf

This installation of CentOS 5.2 is on a i386 machine, be sure to substitute in for a 64-bit machine if you have one. Following most/all of the instructions will give you an OpenVZ CentOS 5.2 host with browser-based administration of your VPS(es) with vtonf. This cookbook assumes running knowledge of how to edit configuration files via “vi”, using yum to install dependencies/software, and how to install via tarballs (.tar.gz).

  1. Install latest CentOS distro on physical server (at the time of writing this, it was 5.2)
    • minimal install only requires disc 1 – “CentOS-5.2-i386-bin-1of6.iso”
    • choose your mirror: http://isoredirect.centos.org/centos/5/isos/i386/
    • partition setup note: 5GB for root filesystem, 1.25X-2X size of RAM for swap, rest of space for /vz (the VPS nodes and OS templates)
    • During the category/task selection, deselect all package categories, and choose the “Customize now” option at the bottom of screen. During the customized package selection, deselect everything. This will allow for a “minimal” install with only disc 1.
  2. Configure static ipv4/ipv6 address(es) – /etc/sysconfig/network/
  3. Setup dns nameservers – /etc/resolv.conf
  4. Run an update: yum update
  5. Follow hotwo: http://www.howtoforge.com/installing-and-using-openvz-on-centos5.2
  6. Download VTONF – http://vtonf.com/downloads.html
  7. tar xzvf on the archive you just downloaded and cd into the created directory
  8. Follow on screen instructions to complete setup
  9. If you wanna go crazy with the customizations get into the “/etc/vtonf/” directory and check things out
  10. To allow connections to vtonf from IPv4/6 addresses other than through the localhost, modify the code block within “/etc/vtonf/vtonf.conf” so it looks like the below code block. Note the second line!

    fastcgi.server = ( ".php" =>
    ( "*" =>
    ( "socket" => "/tmp/vtonf.socket",
    "bin-path" => "/usr/local/vtonfphp/bin/php",
    "max-procs" => 1,
    "bin-environment" => (
    "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "4",
    "PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS" => "10000"
    ),
    )
    )
    )

  11. Remember to modify the OpenVZ host IPTABLES rules so that it allows traffic to the VPS nodes. I just turned mine off (service iptables stop; chkconfig iptables off), because I got an external firewall/router in my home LAN.

That’s it you are good to go to start reselling VPSes to clients!