29 Jan
2009
29 Jan
'09
1:19 p.m.
Hi,
I'm interested in running Xen on a spare computer in order to get some
hands on experience with virtualisation and other aspects of running
linux and networking. My Bitfolk VPS is running Debian, and I have the
most experience with that distribution, however I think I saw that
Bitfolk were using Ubuntu on new servers and was wondering which
distribution would be best for me? As the computer will be used purely
for experimenting with I thought I'd run the unstable or testing
branch of whichever distribution in order to get the latest code.
I'd like to keep the installations as minimal and well documented as
possible so was wondering whether debootstrap (or the appropriate
alternative) would be the best way to go for installation of the OS?
Its likely that I might want to use the host for staging/testing of my
virtual machine destined for my Bitfolk VPS, is there anything I'd
need to do in particular to make sure that it'd be compatible? or
would any Xen domain be easy to copy over?
Finally, as I said above I'd like to document and record the
configuration and running of the host as much as possible. I
previously tried using dokuwiki for a similar purpose, however I had a
few issues when it came to printing the documentation and would like
to make keeping and (if possible) automating documentation as easy as
possible. So I'd appreciate any suggestions on that.
Thanks in advance for your help, sorry my email is a bit long! :-)
29 Jan
29 Jan
2:05 p.m.
On Thu, 29 Jan 2009 13:19:51 +0000
Richard Green <rich(a)atomic-x.co.uk> wrote:
I'm interested in running Xen on a spare computer
in order to get
some hands on experience with virtualisation and other aspects of
running linux and networking. My Bitfolk VPS is running Debian, and I
have the most experience with that distribution, however I think I
saw that Bitfolk were using Ubuntu on new servers and was wondering
which distribution would be best for me?
<flamebait>
I admit to being very biased but why on earth would you want to use
ubuntu if you are already used to Debian, That other distro is only
"messed about" Debian
--
John Lewis
Debian & the GeneWeb genealogical data server
3:43 p.m.
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 02:36:41PM +0000, Alan Pope wrote:
2009/1/29 john lewis <zen57162(a)zen.co.uk>uk>:
Not wanting to but I must say I can't recommend Ubuntu for servers
anymore due to security updates apparently not happening. This bug:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gitweb/+bug/317052
hasn't been fixed in ~2 weeks despite it being rather serious and
affectly a supposedly Long Term Support release.
David
______________________________________________________________________
This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System.
For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email
______________________________________________________________________
<flamebait>
I admit to being very biased but why on earth would you want to use
ubuntu if you are already used to Debian, That other distro is only
"messed about" Debian
Dont feed the troll. 
3:50 p.m.
On 29 Jan 2009, at 15:43, David Leadbeater wrote:
hasn't been fixed in ~2 weeks despite it being
rather serious and
affectly a supposedly Long Term Support release.
Long Term Support only refers to the support Canonical provides, which
is more-or-less the packages in Main. It's all too easy to moan about
the supposed lack of action without doing something about it.
Iain
This message has been checked for viruses but the contents of an attachment
may still contain software viruses, which could damage your computer system:
you are advised to perform your own checks. Email communications with the
University of Nottingham may be monitored as permitted by UK legislation.
3:57 p.m.
2009/1/29 Iain Lane <iain(a)orangesquash.org.uk>uk>:
On 29 Jan 2009, at 15:43, David Leadbeater wrote:
To be fair...
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gitweb/+bug/317052/comments/2
"David Leadbeater wrote on 2009-01-23: (permalink)
* hardy-gitweb-cve2008-5516.diff (9.3 KiB, text/plain)
Here's a patch for it in hardy, would be good to see this released.."
Al.
hasn't been fixed in ~2 weeks despite it
being rather serious and
affectly a supposedly Long Term Support release.
Long Term Support only refers to the support Canonical provides, which
is more-or-less the packages in Main. It's all too easy to moan about
the supposed lack of action without doing something about it.
3:58 p.m.
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 03:50:40PM +0000, Iain Lane wrote:
On 29 Jan 2009, at 15:43, David Leadbeater wrote:
Given that David has supplied them with a patch, I can't see much
more he *can* do. :)
Hugo.
--
=== Hugo Mills: hugo@... carfax.org.uk | darksatanic.net | lug.org.uk ===
PGP key: 515C238D from wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net or http://www.carfax.org.uk
--- Why play all the notes, when you need only play ---
the most beautiful?
hasn't been fixed in ~2 weeks despite it
being rather serious and
affectly a supposedly Long Term Support release.
Long Term Support only refers to the support Canonical provides, which
is more-or-less the packages in Main. It's all too easy to moan about
the supposed lack of action without doing something about it. 
3:58 p.m.
Hello,
2009/1/29 Iain Lane <iain(a)orangesquash.org.uk>uk>:
Long Term Support only refers to the support Canonical
provides, which
is more-or-less the packages in Main. It's all too easy to moan about
the supposed lack of action without doing something about it.
Then the LTS release is no more than a misleading badge to earn
Canonical a little more money? One more reason we shouldn't use Ubuntu
on servers, perhaps. In my opinion, supplying a patch *is* doing
something about it anyway.
Yours,
Robert
4:03 p.m.
On 29 Jan 2009, at 15:58, Robert Leverington wrote:
Hello,
2009/1/29 Iain Lane <iain(a)orangesquash.org.uk>uk>:
Sorry, I apologise for not noticing that the patch was from you :).
I imagine that it will be uploaded soon. Having tried to seek
sponsorship in Debian, it's not really that much easier to be honest.
Iain
This message has been checked for viruses but the contents of an attachment
may still contain software viruses, which could damage your computer system:
you are advised to perform your own checks. Email communications with the
University of Nottingham may be monitored as permitted by UK legislation.
Long Term Support only refers to the support
Canonical provides,
which
is more-or-less the packages in Main. It's all too easy to moan about
the supposed lack of action without doing something about it.
Then the LTS release is no more than a misleading badge to earn
Canonical a little more money? One more reason we shouldn't use Ubuntu
on servers, perhaps. In my opinion, supplying a patch *is* doing
something about it anyway.
4:07 p.m.
Hello,
2009/1/29 Iain Lane <iain(a)orangesquash.org.uk>uk>:
On 29 Jan 2009, at 15:58, Robert Leverington wrote:
It was from David who originally bought this topic up.
Yours,
Robert
Hello,
2009/1/29 Iain Lane <iain(a)orangesquash.org.uk>uk>:
Sorry, I apologise for not noticing that the patch was from you :).
Long Term Support only refers to the support Canonical provides, which
is more-or-less the packages in Main. It's all too easy to moan about
the supposed lack of action without doing something about it.
Then the LTS release is no more than a misleading badge to earn
Canonical a little more money? One more reason we shouldn't use Ubuntu
on servers, perhaps. In my opinion, supplying a patch *is* doing
something about it anyway.
4:04 p.m.
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 03:58:52PM +0000, Robert Leverington wrote:
2009/1/29 Iain Lane <iain(a)orangesquash.org.uk>uk>:
Hardly. You get support on the things *in the main distribution*.
That's not the case for the package in question, which is in Universe.
This isn't enabled by default, and I believe that it's pretty clear
about the support status of those packages when you do enable
Universe.
Stick to the supported packages, and you get a supported system...
Hugo.
--
=== Hugo Mills: hugo@... carfax.org.uk | darksatanic.net | lug.org.uk ===
PGP key: 515C238D from wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net or http://www.carfax.org.uk
--- Why play all the notes, when you need only play ---
the most beautiful?
Long Term Support only refers to the support
Canonical provides, which
is more-or-less the packages in Main. It's all too easy to moan about
the supposed lack of action without doing something about it.
Then the LTS release is no more than a misleading badge to earn
Canonical a little more money? One more reason we shouldn't use Ubuntu
on servers, perhaps.
4:08 p.m.
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 04:04:10PM +0000, Hugo Mills wrote:
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 03:58:52PM +0000, Robert
Leverington wrote:
Although to further confuse matters git-core is in main (therefore the
source package I supplied a patch for is git-core, which is in main,
but it affects a package in universe).
David
2009/1/29 Iain Lane
<iain(a)orangesquash.org.uk>uk>:
Hardly. You get support on the things *in the main distribution*.
That's not the case for the package in question, which is in Universe.
This isn't enabled by default, and I believe that it's pretty clear
about the support status of those packages when you do enable
Universe.
Stick to the supported packages, and you get a supported system... Long Term Support only refers to the support
Canonical provides, which
is more-or-less the packages in Main. It's all too easy to moan about
the supposed lack of action without doing something about it.
Then the LTS release is no more than a misleading badge to earn
Canonical a little more money? One more reason we shouldn't use Ubuntu
on servers, perhaps. 
2:45 p.m.
Hi,
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 02:05:56PM +0000, john lewis wrote:
I admit to being very biased but why on earth would
you want to use
ubuntu if you are already used to Debian, That other distro is only
"messed about" Debian
If your goal is to have a staging environment then I would urge you
to keep the same guest OS as your VPS is using of course, as in my
experience the majority of configuration problems are within the
guest.
I think this is less of an issue for the dom0 though.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Encrypted mail welcome - keyid 0x604DE5DB
2:32 p.m.
Hi Richard,
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 01:19:51PM +0000, Richard Green wrote:
I'm interested in running Xen on a spare computer
in order to get some
hands on experience with virtualisation and other aspects of running
linux and networking. My Bitfolk VPS is running Debian, and I have the
most experience with that distribution, however I think I saw that
Bitfolk were using Ubuntu on new servers and was wondering which
distribution would be best for me?
At the moment I am evaluating Ubuntu, but new servers would be
Debian Lenny.
I know others using Debian Hardy as dom0 and they are doing alright,
so if you preferred Ubuntu I wouldn't have thought it would be a
problem.
As the computer will be used purely for experimenting
with I
thought I'd run the unstable or testing branch of whichever
distribution in order to get the latest code.
If your goal is only to experiment with virtualisation at home then
I probably wouldn't recommend Xen to be honest. But you did say
below that you were interested in doing some staging to your bitfolk
VPS, so I'll carry on talking about Xen..
I'd like to keep the installations as minimal and
well documented as
possible so was wondering whether debootstrap (or the appropriate
alternative) would be the best way to go for installation of the OS?
On Debian (and derivatives) you can use Steve Kemp's excellent
xen-tools to provision virtual machines. I don't do this because I
started doing it before xen-tools existed and haven't got around to
changing my ways yet, but the end result is pretty similar and
xen-tools gets you there a lot easier.
Its likely that I might want to use the host for
staging/testing of my
virtual machine destined for my Bitfolk VPS, is there anything I'd
need to do in particular to make sure that it'd be compatible? or
would any Xen domain be easy to copy over?
In general they are easy to move around. You just need a filesystem
that can be booted. At the moment I am keeping guests in LVM
volumes (one LV per block device) and using pygrub to boot them, so
the guest needs valid a grub config. grub itself does not need to
be installed though there is no harm if it is.
The only real gotchas I have found so far are:
- if you were to use Debian Etch or something of that vintage for
your dom0 then you would have problems with the kernels of newer
distributions as guests.
- Ubuntu in their wisdom have made the Intrepid kernel incompatible
with anything older than a Hard backports dom0 kernel. So either
use mad bleeding edge dom0 kernel or else use older kernel on Intrepid
guests.
- Start 64-bit unless you're sure you'll never need more than 16G in
the dom0! Also Bitfolk will likely be 64-bit hypervisor with
32-bit dom0 and guests for the foreseeable future, if you wanted
to replicate configuration.
Finally, as I said above I'd like to document and
record the
configuration and running of the host as much as possible. I
previously tried using dokuwiki for a similar purpose, however I had a
few issues when it came to printing the documentation and would like
to make keeping and (if possible) automating documentation as easy as
possible. So I'd appreciate any suggestions on that.
I just use a wiki, configurations in subversion, and am slowly
introducing configuration management in the from of Puppet, which I
do recommend highly even if you only have a few machines.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Encrypted mail welcome - keyid 0x604DE5DB
5560
days inactive
5560
days old
13 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
-
Alan Pope -
Andy Smith -
David Leadbeater -
Hugo Mills -
Iain Lane -
john lewis -
Richard Green -
Robert Leverington