Re: Instant Xen guest (guest-magic tool)

[Gaurav Maheshbhai Patel <gmpatel@learn.senecac.on.ca>]

Hi steve,
First of all , Thank you very much for your comments.
guest-magic  doesn't really install fresh versions of a guest but instead clones one that you already have running and just want a instant copy of it. Its basically take a snapshot of running guest and create another copy of it [cloning].
Also, We also appriciate the second comment. We haven't thought about that /tmp/guestmagic suggestion.
We will try to come up with a better way of doing things instead of using the temp file in the next release. Well piping is good suggestion. 

We kindly consider that there are some limitations in guest-magic tool. We released it so professionals can give their suggestion and comments.
Also , if you think we should also add this functionality in guest-magic, we could try our best.
Thank You.
Gaurav.

----- Original Message -----
From: Steve Kemp <steve@steve.org.uk>
Date: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 4:06 am
Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] Instant Xen guest (guest-magic tool)
To: Gaurav Maheshbhai Patel <gmpatel@learn.senecac.on.ca>
Cc: xen-devel@lists.xensource.com

> On Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 09:51:46PM -0500, Gaurav Maheshbhai Patel 
> wrote:
> > Give new guest domain name and memory. You Are 
> Done!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 
> > We also successfully released it on sourceforge.net. 
> 
> > This is our first release. And development is in progress.
> > Comments and suggestion is HIGHLY appriciated.
> 
>  Just two quick comments.
> 
>  Firstly it doesn't seem to do everything, just create an LVM volume
> and the configuration file.  I was hoping it would install fresh
> copies of Fedora/Debian/Gentoo/etc.
> 
>  Secondly you shouldn't really be using /tmp in the way that you
> are.  This is very dangerous:
> 
>        commands.getoutput('xm list > /tmp/guestmagic')
> 
>  "xm" has to be run as root, so what you're doing is writing the
> output of a command, as root, into a file in /tmp which anybody
> else upon the system might have created.
> 
>  Consider what happens if userA were to run:
> 
>        ln -s /tmp/guestmagic /etc/passwd
> 
>  The next time you run your application the password file would
> be trashed!
> 
>  I'd suggest you either use a pipe, or a secure *unpredictable*
> filename instead.
> 
> Steve
> -- 
> Debian GNU/Linux System Administration
> http://www.debian-administration.org/
> 
>