Re: Instant Xen guest (guest-magic tool)

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

Hi steve,
The comment on /tmp/guestmagic was really good.
I was wondering what if we use /tmp/$$ 

>     commands.getoutput('xm list > /tmp/$$')

Is it create the same problem as /tmp/guestmagic?

Thanks in advance
Gaurav


----- Original Message -----
From: Steve Kemp <steve@steve.org.uk>
Date: Thursday, April 12, 2007 1:52 pm
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 Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 12:17:47PM -0400, Gaurav Maheshbhai Patel 
> wrote:
> > Well good to hear that you are working on same kind of project.
> > I was wondering about your suggestion. If we make a copy/snapshot 
> of it. Then Installing fresh copy of Some linux distro....
> > 1) How can we do that? 
> 
>  Depends on the type of distribution you've got.  For Debian dom0 you
> can use tools like debootstrap to automatically install fresh copies
> of Debian inside a directory/partition.  Similarly you could use a 
> tool like rpmstrap to install copies of CentOS.  (Though rpmstrap 
> is very
> fragile and prone to breakage).
> 
> > 2) If we do that then, doesn't it take the same time to 
> installing new distro on guest?
> 
>  I don't fully understand what you're asking there.  If you're using
> a tool like rpmstrap, or debootstrap, then it'd take a few minutes to
> install (or more depending on your network link).
> 
>  If you had several Linux distribution images locally you could do
> a copy in a few seconds.
> 
>  (That's what we do at work - we have a collection of configured 
> Linux distributions mounted read-only, and we simply copy those 
> into new
> guests automatically.  The process of installing Gentoo, Debian,
> Ubuntu, or CentOS takes only a few minutes - but it does rely upon
> you creating the "source" installations manually first.  There are
> a small collection of fixups applied after the copy to setup unique
> IPs, hostnames, etc, but otherwise the new copies are basically 
> clones of the centralized master copy of each distribution.)
> 
> > Also have you looked at the snap shot of guest-magic on 
> sourceforge.net? 
> 
>  Yes ..
> 
> > Well IP assignment is still issue there because of short deadline 
> of the project. But we are still going to do that.
> 
> > Also, can you please tell me about what are you working on? 
> > Might be it helps us some what
> 
>  xen-tools :
> 
>    http://xen-tools.org/software/xen-tools/
> 
>  Developed and used primarily upon Debian GNU/Linux, but apparently
> portable to things like CentOS and Fedora Core.
> 
> Steve
> -- 
>