Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : VPS Hosting : VPS Tutorials : Centmin - a low memory CentOS install script

[BTCentral - Ben]

We're recently been re-working our CentOS install script so that it does the following:

- Updates any already installed software (via YUM)
- Secures /tmp (and /var/tmp)
- Installs a limited selection of development tools (C, C++ compilers, autoconf, automake and pkgconfig)
- Sets local timezone
- Installs Nginx, MySQL, PHP 5.3.3 (/w FPM)
- Installs NSD (DNS Server, alternative to BIND etc.)
- Installs NTP to sync clock time - though obviously not on OpenVZ VPS (as you can not set the time on OpenVZ)
- Installs SendMail

There are a few last tweaks/bugfixes that need to be made, however I was wondering if anyone find this useful when it's done?
If so, I will put it up on our site - though it will probably be in a day or two.

For anyone interested, with the above installed and running it's currently using less than 50MB RAM (running CentOS 5.5 32bit on a Xen PV VPS).

I am happy to announce that Centmin is now publicly available.

Firstly, make sure that you read the readme.txt
Secondly, 4 hours and two further revisions later, everything is now working fine.

You can grab the script from here - enjoy

[Kurikami]

Sure please share it, I guess it's a reworded LEA Debian script?

[BTCentral - Ben]

Originally Posted by Kurikami

Sure please share it, I guess it's a reworded LEA Debian script?

No, it's actually been made in-house from scratch.

And in that case I will try to get it finished off either this evening, or tomorrow (depending on my free time) and get it uploaded (with a readme/howto).

[qualityhostings]

I'd love to see it

[Nnyan]

= ) you know I would fine it useful! Good job Ben.

[Syslint]

Is it install The os is a fresh server , or just update an already installed os ?

[BTCentral - Ben]

Originally Posted by vcPanel

Is it install The os is a fresh server , or just update an already installed os ?

It's something that personally I would normally install on a freshly installed CentOS server, however it can also be run on a server that has already been setup - as you have the option to enable/disable the various software installation options, and answer yes or no to the questions it asks you.

Obviously for best results it would be used on a minimal CentOS template.

---

I am about to wipe our test VPS and check that v1.0.1 is working properly, if there are not any problems with it this will be the version that is initially released.
While I spent some time fixing various issues yesterday evening, by the time I had finished it had gone 1am, so did not get round to testing it then.

This means hopefully assuming everything works OK then I will get the time to write up some documentation for it this evening, if not it should be tomorrow evening this gets uploaded by at the latest.

[CoderJosh]

Thanks a lot for sharing this script Ben!

[Dregond Rahl]

Looks like a great script, ill try it out soon. a few questions though

1. Will this work with CentOS 5.5 ?
2. whats the RAM usage of this setup?
3. Any recommended minimal CentOS template?
4. Any specific reason why you used NSD over BIND ?


Also I would recommend adding an option for Nginx to choose latest development or stable release.

[BTCentral - Ben]

Originally Posted by CoderJosh

Thanks a lot for sharing this script Ben!

No problem.

Originally Posted by Dregond Rahl

Looks like a great script, ill try it out soon. a few questions though

1. Will this work with CentOS 5.5 ?
2. whats the RAM usage of this setup?
3. Any recommended minimal CentOS template?
4. Any specific reason why you used NSD over BIND ?

1. Of course - it's been tested on CentOS 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5 (32 and 64bit) - but it should work just fine with all versions of CentOS 5.

2. Depends on what other services you have running, but on its own, around the 50-60MB RAM mark (it uses 47MB on our Xen PV VPS, where as around 60MB on our OpenVZ VPS in testing) - to disable unneeded services, see here.

3. OpenVZ (CentOS minimal under Contributed templates), Xen, Dedicated server.
Alternatively, the following providers I have used have actual minimal templates: ramhost, ThrustVPS, niXcom - I think both Server Complete, and Delimiter do too, but can not remember.

4. Simple BIND is a memory hog, NSD is not - that and NSD uses BIND zone files (which keeps things simple for me).

Bind running 12 zones:
116020 VSZ / 31452 RSS (113.3 MB VSZ/30.7 MB RSS)

NSD running the same 12 zones:

VSZ RSS
14168 924
21032 852
14340 628

(48.3 MB VSZ/2.3 MB RSS overall)

Where RSS is physical memory used, VSZ being the virtual memory used.

Originally Posted by Dregond Rahl

Also I would recommend adding an option for Nginx to choose latest development or stable release.

Done - v1.0.4 released (grab it here), updated the readme.txt, added "NGINX_VERSION" flag (line 23).
To use the development version instead simply change it to read: NGINX_VERSION='0.8.50'

[RavC]

Ben, thanks for contributing this script to the community it looks good.
Unfortunately in my testing both nginx and nsd were not installed correctly in either 32 or 64 bit test runs. Is it just me or has someone else found the same issue? I can only assume it's due to a missing dependency since you're compiling both?

[BTCentral - Ben]

Originally Posted by RavC

Ben, thanks for contributing this script to the community it looks good.
Unfortunately in my testing both nginx and nsd were not installed correctly in either 32 or 64 bit test runs. Is it just me or has someone else found the same issue? I can only assume it's due to a missing dependency since you're compiling both?

Hi RavC, thanks for the feedback.

Any chance getting a log of any of the errors? - I have tried it on multiple VPS providers under both 64bit and 32bit environments so the only thing I can think of that would be causing that is as you said, a missing dependency that for whatever reason is not installed on your templates but on all the other minimal templates I have used.

If you can provide a log, hopefully we can work out what is missing and add it to the development tools list.

[BTCentral - Ben]

Meant to say - you can log the script output easily this way:
source centmin.sh 2>&1 | tee centmin.log

Thanks!

[xentos]

alot of people can make good use of it, especially the starters.

[qualityhostings]

Thank you very much for this contribution. I am playing with nginx/php-fpm/bind since a month and I think this will help me.
I am going to try this now.


Any chance you could add mail server ?