How to use a custom image on your VPS

This guide explains how to write a custom image directly to your VPS disk from Resque mode. After a reboot, your VPS starts the system from the image right away.

Warning

Writing an image completely overwrites the VPS disk. All data on the server, including the current operating system, will be permanently lost. Make a backup of anything you need before you start.

Image formats

Ready-made images usually come in .img, .raw or .qcow2 format, often packed into a .zip or .gz archive. .img and .raw images can be written as they are, while .qcow2 images must be converted to .raw first (for example, with qemu-img convert -O raw image.qcow2 image.raw), which is not possible in the Resque system.

  1. Log in to panel: https://vps-panel.veesp.com:443 by using your Username and Password from the VPS Service page "Login Details" tab.

    Login into Control Panel

  2. Enter the "Resque" mode

    Enter Resque mode

  3. Click "Enable Resque Mode" and press "Yes" to confirm

    Enable Resque mode

    When Enabled - Rescue mode can take several minutes before it becomes accessible on the network

  4. SSH into your VM from terminal using "Resque SSH connection details"

    SSH into Resque

    Manual: How to connect to my Linux VPS via SSH?

  5. Find your VPS disk with the lsblk command:

    lsblk

    Example output:

    NAME   MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0   40G  0 disk
├─sda1   8:1    0    1M  0 part
└─sda2   8:2    0   40G  0 part
sr0     11:0    1 1024M  0 rom
vda    254:0    0  1.1G  0 disk
└─vda1 254:1    0  1.1G  0 part /

    Your VPS disk is the one whose size matches your VPS hosting plan, in this example sda (40G). Use the whole disk (/dev/sda), not a partition such as /dev/sda2.

    Warning

    The small disk mounted as / (here vda, 1.1G) is the Resque system itself. Never write the image to it.

  6. Download the image and write it to the disk. The Resque system has no curl or wget, so use python3. Choose the tab that matches your image format, put a direct link to the image in the URL line and replace /dev/sda with your disk from step 5:

    URL="http://example.com/image.raw"
python3 -c "import urllib.request,shutil,sys; shutil.copyfileobj(urllib.request.urlopen(sys.argv[1]), sys.stdout.buffer)" "$URL" | dd of=/dev/sda bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync

    URL="http://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/25.12.5/targets/x86/64/openwrt-25.12.5-x86-64-generic-ext4-combined.img.gz"
python3 -c "import urllib.request,zlib,sys; r=urllib.request.urlopen(sys.argv[1]); d=zlib.decompressobj(31); [sys.stdout.buffer.write(d.decompress(c)) for c in iter(lambda: r.read(1048576), b'')]" "$URL" | dd of=/dev/sda bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync

    A .zip archive has to be downloaded first. Check that there is enough free space with df -h /, then download the archive and write the image from it:

    URL="http://download.mikrotik.com/routeros/7.24.6/chr-7.24.6.img.zip"
python3 -c "import urllib.request,shutil,sys; shutil.copyfileobj(urllib.request.urlopen(sys.argv[1]), open('/root/image.zip','wb'))" "$URL"
python3 -c "import zipfile,shutil,sys; z=zipfile.ZipFile('/root/image.zip'); shutil.copyfileobj(z.open(z.namelist()[0]), sys.stdout.buffer)" | dd of=/dev/sda bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync

    Note

    The Resque system can download only via http:// links: https:// links fail with the CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED error. If you get 0 bytes copied, the download failed and nothing was written to the disk.

    Note

    Double-check the of= value before you press Enter. dd does not ask for confirmation.

  7. Flush all data to the disk and check the result:

    sync
blockdev --rereadpt /dev/sda
lsblk -f /dev/sda

    The partitions from the image should now be listed under your disk instead of the old ones.

  8. Click "Disable Resque Mode" and it will reboot the server.

  9. Open the VNC console. The VPS will boot the system from the image. Log in with the default credentials of the image.

    Manual: How to connect to my VPS using VNC console