vmbuilder team mailing list archive

[Warren Turkal <wt@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for the help in getting these changes merged.

With regard to the other solutions, I looked over oz, and I still really
don't understand how I'd use it to do what I want. It appears to depend on
the preseed system, which would require that I do things like install the
bootloader or partition the disk within the install. What I am looking for
is a way to get a disk image using debootstrap --variant=minbase (plus some
additional packages) that I can just dd onto my root partition. During my
install procedure, I partition the drives with sgdisk and do something very
similar to the following:

# wget -O - https://imgserver/image.img.gz | gunzip -c | dd if=/dev/stdin
of=/dev/sda2 bs=32M

Then, of course, I update the uuid on the root partition, install the
bootloader, fixup the fstab, and do some other stuff like network config.
All of this other configuration is highly machine dependent and some of the
configuration is pulled from a web service frontend to a database. Also,
preseed doesn't seem to support partitioning different drives in different
ways. For example, here's a sample partition table for sda:
Number   Start (sector)   End (sector)  Size      Code  Name
1                  2048           4095  1024 KiB  EF02  boot
2                  4096       10489855  5.0 GiB   0700  root
3              10489856       62914526  25.0 GiB  0700  data

and for sdb-sdzzzz:
Number   Start (sector)   End (sector)  Size      Code  Name
1                  2048           4095  1024 KiB  EF02  boot
2                  4096       62914526  30.0 GiB  0700  data

We just mount all the data volumes in a JBOD fasion under
/disks/sd{a..zzzz}.

Basically, I am doing my installs this way to unify our environment whether
we are on EC2, in-house VMs, or bare metal. If there's a good way to
generate these images otherwise, I am certainly open to it.

wt


On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 2:32 PM, Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn@xxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> Quoting Warren Turkal (wt@xxxxxxxxxx):
> > Hi vmbuilders,
> >
> > I am working on some vmbuilder changes. Here's a small list:
> >
> >    - Bare metal image support - I am already working on this one. I will
> be
> >    generating the image within an lxc container. It will be output as a
> image
> >    file for the root partition. It will not be a whole disk image. As a
> >    result, I also will not be installing a bootloader until the image is
> >    installed onto some machine. I have an installer that I've written in
> >    shell+golang using tinycore linux as a base. This installer will
> eventually
> >    be opened up as well.
> >    - Convert optparse to argparse - Would this be interesting to anyone?
> I
> >    think it would be nice to turn the hypervisor and suite names into
> >    subcommands and get rid of allow_interspersed_args() and parsing the
> args
> >    more than once.
> >
> > I just wanted to share with others, so if you have ideas, please let me
> > know.
>
> Hi Warren,
>
> note that in general vmbuilder is deprecated in favor of other
> solutions (see
> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/servercloud-r-vmbuilder
> for the latest discussion we had about this).
>
> Any patches which look simple enough I'll just apply.  For anything
> which is more complicated, I'd appreciate some comments in the merge
> proposals giving detailed test steps.  (so far your merge proposal
> messages have been great so I don't anticipate any problem).
>
> If at some point you want me to cut a new release for raring with
> what is in lp:vmbuilder, please shout.
>
> -serge
>



-- 
*Warren Turkal*
Site Reliability Engineer |
wt@xxxxxxxxxx | 650-961-3400
www.ooyala.com | blog <http://www.ooyala.com/blog> |
@ooyala<http://www.twitter.com/ooyala>