Overview ^^^^^^^^ snf-image-creator is a simple command-line tools for creating OS images. The original media from which the image is created, can be a block device or a regular file that represents a hard disk. Given a media file, snf-image-creator will create a snapshot for it and will run a number of system preparation operations on the snapshot, before the image is created. Snapshotting ============ snf-image-creator works on snapshots of the original media. Any changes made by the program do not affect the original media. Preparation =========== Some of the system preparation operations are OS specific. snf-image-creator will use heuristics to detect the OS of the media and determine which operations should perform on it. The main purpose of running them is to: * Shrink the image * Clear out sensitive user data (passwords, ssh keys, history files, etc.) * Prepare the guest OS for being deployed on a virtual environment (change device names, remove persistent net rules, etc.) Creation ======== The program can either dump the image file locally or directly upload it to pithos and register it with `okeanos `_. Image Format ============ The images the program creates are in diskdump format. This is the recommended format for `snf-image `_, the Ganeti OS Definition used by `Synnefo `_.