Associating Container Files With Application Templates

It may often happen that a security update should immediately be applied to a package installed as a template on the server and added to a number of Containers hosted there. However, it takes certain time to prepare a template update, so the server and/or Container administrators are not inclined to wait for it and they install the original security update directly inside the Containers. As to the template update, it becomes available a few days afterwards. In other cases, a Container administrator might not know that there is a certain template installed on the server, so they install the corresponding application directly inside their Container.

To eliminate cluttering up the Container disk space with application files that are present as part of an application template on the server, the vzpkg link utility is used. When executed, this utility links your Container to the application EZ templates installed on the server. Assuming that you manually installed the openssl application inside Container 101 running Fedora 8, you can use the following command to replace the openssl files inside this Container with symlinks to these files in the /vz/template/fedora-core/8/x86/config/app/openssl directory on the server:

# vzpkg link 101