Preparing a CentOS 5.4 AMI for LAMP server

I used the RightScale AMI with id ami-f8b35e91, which has a pretty minimalistic installation of CentOS 5.4. Here are the steps I did to make it ready to run my sites

• install rpmforge
  

  yum install yum-priorities

  Edit the .repo files in /etc/yum.repos.d/ and set up priorities by adding the line:
  priority=1 in the [base], [addons], [updates], [extras] sections, and the line
  priority=2 in the [centosplus],[contrib]
  

  rpm --import http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
  wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
  rpm -K rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
  rpm -ivh rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
  

  Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo and add the line
  

  priority=10

  Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge-testing.repo and add the line
  

  priority=15

• update the system
  

  yum update
  

• install apache, mysql, php and some other packages
  

  yum install httpd php mysql mysql-server php-cli php-gd php-mbstring php-pdo php-pecl-fileinfo php-mysql php-imap php-ldap php-pear php-xml php-xmlrpc
   mod_ssl ImageMagick elinks emacs fetchmail mod_python netpbm netpbm-progs nmap ntp strace webalizer rdiff-backup trac
  

• install amazon's AMI tools
  

  rpm -Uvh http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-ami-tools.noarch.rpm
  

• turn off some services

chkconfig rightscale off
chkconfig jexec off
chkconfig --level 06 jexec off
chkconfig ip6tables off
chkconfig iptables off
chkconfig netfs off
chkconfig nfslock off
chkconfig portmap off
chkconfig xfs off
chkconfig mcstrans off

• install EC2 API tools
  

  wget http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-api-tools.zip
  cd /usr/local/ec2
  unzip /root/ec2-api-tools.zip
  ln -s ec2-api-tools-* apitools
  

• get rid of some unneeded packages

yum remove cups gcc-gnat libgnat cups-libs libobjc gcc-objc++ kernel-2.6.18-164.11.1.el5 kernel-headers-2.6.18-164.11.1.el5

• add back c, c++ compilers
  

  yum install gcc gcc-c++

• turn on services we need
  

  chkconfig httpd on
  chkconfig mysqld on
  chkconfig ntpd on
  

• change /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 to contain
  

  DEVICE=eth0
  BOOTPROTO=dhcp
  ONBOOT=yes
  TYPE=Ethernet
  USERCTL=yes
  PEERDNS=yes
  IPV6INIT=no
  



• change /etc/sysconfig/network to contain
  

  HOSTNAME=yourhost.yourdomain
  NETWORKING=yes
  NETWORKING_IPV6=no
  



• My site is an old legacy php site, which needs register_globals and register_long_arrays. So edit /etc/php.ini to set
  

  register_globals = On
  register_long_arrays = On
  memory_limit = 128M
  



• edit /etc/logrotate.d/httpd and add /var/www/logs/*log
  


• add user USER
  

  groupadd -g GID USER
  useradd -g GID -u UID USER
  



• change passwords for root and USER
  

  passwd USER
  passwd
  



• add crontab for USER


• create the directory where EBS LVM will be mounted
  

  mkdir /vol
  



• edit /etc/fstab to add
  

  /dev/vg1/lv1          /vol              ext3    defaults,noatime        0 0
  /vol/home             /home             none    bind                    0 0
  /vol/etc/httpd        /etc/httpd        none    bind                    0 0
  /vol/etc/pki          /etc/pki          none    bind                    0 0
  /vol/var/www          /var/www          none    bind                    0 0
  /vol/var/trac         /var/trac         none    bind                    0 0
  /vol/var/lib/mysql    /var/lib/mysql    none    bind                    0 0
  



• edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and set
  

  PasswordAuthentication yes
  



• install the QuickForm pear package
  

  pear install HTML_QuickForm
  

• get rid of the RightScale motd
  

  echo -n > /etc/motd
  



• use the re-bundle script from my previous post to create the AMI