Debian

Install most basic Debian Jessie container for use as a template for LXC or similar

To create a most basic Debian Jessie container, you can follow these steps:

mkdir jessie
cd jessie
mkdir rootfs
cd rootfs/
debootstrap jessie . http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/
chroot .
passwd

You should not forget to set the root password as it is good to have a known value later.

Now that we are within the container, we can configure the most basic settings that we will need for all containers:

tasksel --task-packages standard | xargs apt-get install -y
dpkg-reconfigure locales

Here I am usually generating 

  de_DE.ISO-8859-1
  de_DE.UTF-8
  de_DE.ISO-8859-15@euro
  en_US.ISO-8859-1
  en_US.ISO-8859-15
  en_US.UTF-8

and set the default to en_US.UTF-8 .

To get the full repository contents, you should change your repository sources to look as below:

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian jessie main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian-security jessie/updates main contrib non-free

and then do an aptitude update .

You should also install an SSH server by entering

aptitude install openssh-server

Enable root logins via SSH by changing one line in its configuration:

PermitRootLogin yes

Unfortunately systemd is not yet working easily with LXC, so it should be replaced by the old sysvinit:

aptitude install sysvinit-core
dpkg -P systemd

Edit initial DNS resolver configuration so it looks like this:

search yourdomain.com
nameserver ip.of.your.namserver

Then also configure the main network interface configuration:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
	address 192.168.168.100
	netmask 255.255.255.255
	gateway 192.168.168.1

iface eth0 inet6 static
        address 2001:aaaa:bbbb:0168::2
        netmask 64
        gateway 2001:aaaa:bbbb:0168::1

Replace /etc/inittab with the following short version which is enough for a container:

id:2:initdefault:
si::sysinit:/etc/init.d/rcS
~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin
l0:0:wait:/etc/init.d/rc 0
l1:1:wait:/etc/init.d/rc 1
l2:2:wait:/etc/init.d/rc 2
l3:3:wait:/etc/init.d/rc 3
l4:4:wait:/etc/init.d/rc 4
l5:5:wait:/etc/init.d/rc 5
l6:6:wait:/etc/init.d/rc 6
z6:6:respawn:/sbin/sulogin
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty --noclear 38400 console
p0::powerfail:/sbin/init 0
p6::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/init 6

Should the network not come up automatically, you can set the IP address in the config file of the container:

lxc.network.ipv4=192.168.168.100/24

After a first start, you should also configure the mail server so it can send all system mail to your main mail server:

dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

and answer all the questions.

Shut the machine down again, cleanup all the log files and make a copy which you can then use as your template for further containers.