On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 02:51:21PM -0800, Simon McFarlane wrote: > Hi all, > > Now that the Xen guest stuff is getting some love, I think it would be fun > to toy around with OpenBSD on EC2 (particularly because of EBS -- other VPS > providers like the old standby ARP Networks don't allow you to attach > copious amounts of storage to a low-spec system). > > There are a couple public AMIs available, but I'm curious as to how they are > built. It'd be pretty cool to be able to build a given snapshot into an AMI, > rather than be dependent on whomever is creating the public ones. > > If the builder of the public AMIs is reading this, I'd love to hear what > your process is. > > Thanks, > Simon > I have a relatively simple process involving the use of vmimport.
Basically, build out the VM how you want (I used VirtualBox, but YMMV), then ran something like ec2-import-volume to bring the VHD into AWS. Once that was complete, I booted up an Amazon Linux instance, stopped it, detached the root volume, attached the OpenBSD volume as /dev/xvda, then booted up into OpenBSD. Afterwards, create an AMI of your work. Also note that OpenBSD won't recognize EBS volumes attached as anything other than xvd*. I haven't bothered looking into why. -Jonathon
