Re: organizing virtual machines

["Eric S. Johansson" <esj@harvee.org>]

Tom Hibbert wrote:
> Aha, I only have to read down to this level to see your issue. Gentoo is
> a moving target. That means there is no advanced warning for major
> updates such as the one you describe. Gentoo is best suited to
> developers or hardline BSD refugees who cannot bear to let go of their
> ports system.

unfortunately, I have scar tissue with this problem back to early system 
  V in the mid-1980s.

> Other distributions are different. Debian for instance is divided into
> 'stable' and 'unstable' distributions. 

I prefer to think of this as moldy and compost.  Far too often have 
found that needed versions of packages that debiam hasn't even put into 
unstable yet.  Also, I have horrible luck.  I was forever wiping out the 
distribution having to start over again in addition to the numerous and 
not well-documented Debbie and wrappers for different capabilities.

I personally do not like Red Hat anymore because of the "big bang" 
upgrade process.  I have two ancient Red Hat systems that really need to 
be decommissioned.  Using gentoo cautiously I've been able to keep 
client machines as well as machines here sufficiently current that they 
never get "too old"

.. even one running CP/M on a
> cluster of dead badgers.

I think I'll need to try the cluster of dead badgers.  I have a single 
dead badger running Windows for speech recognition... which is one of 
the reasons why I am so disappointed xen does not run Windows.  It would 
have been nice to use it as my speech recognition platform.  As a 
result, I'm looking at colinux but that has its problems with regards to 
windowing environments.

yes you're quite right that the testing cycle is important and xen is a 
wonderful way of testing.  I'm hoping to have two machines in my 
basement for these very purposes.  After all, one needs to test xen 
before applying live as well.  ;-)


>>my fantasy world for proper system configuration management would
> 
> record baseline and changes so that when baseline changes one can
> re-create the working configuration set (i.e. /etc).  For a virtual
> machine environment like xen, one could have virtual machine associated
> changes with a common baseline so that when you update your executables
> and configuration directory, all the changes replicate properly or can
> be flagged for human attention.
> 
> 
>>I'm planning a working on this when I have some spare neurons.
> 
> 
> Great idea. You might want to take a look at debconf and read the Debian
> packagers guide to give you some inspiration.

believe me, I will take inspiration from any source I can.  About three 
years ago now, took inspiration from Adam Back on hashcash as a form of 
anti-spam.  I figured out what was wrong with naive sender pays 
(hashcash stamp on everything) developed to different types of 
differential payment schemes which dropped the cost to most people 
extremely low and spammers very high.  One of these techniques even 
fixes blacklists so they're not censorship tools but merely very high 
cost barriers that only the truly dedicated can get through i.e. 
inappropriately blocked people.  in conjunction with a friend of mine, 
we've worked out a pricing model for sender pays systems etc. etc.

end result, a system that has very high usability, low visibility.

I believe me, when I'm inspired, I do very interesting things.  :-)

---eric

-- 
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2004/12/18/heloise/index.html

The basis of Abelard's philosophy, which he taught to Heloise, was
that logic had to be applied to religion in order to arrive at the
truth.


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