[Sussex] Re: UML filesystems

[Nic James Ferrier]

> Nik

Hi Stephen

/8->


> On Thu, 2006-07-13 at 18:40 +0100, Nic James Ferrier wrote:
>> While we're on the subject of virtualization... do people here think
>> that a site offering free downloads of filesystems with various
>> preconfigured stuff in would be interesting?
>> 
>> I'm think of things that are normally a pain to configure like:
>> 
>>   gforge
>>   asterisk at home
>>   mythtv
>>   powerdns/ldap/mysql/postgresql/etc...
>> 
>> If one can download a working filesystem then one can either:
>> 
>> - use it to soup up your native OS
>> - run services directly inside the OS via chroot
>> - run a UML on the file system
>> 
>> Anybody interested in such a thing?
>
> An intresting idea.  How are you going to tackle applications that have
> configuration and other files that are spread over multiple file
> systems?
>
> I am one of those people that break their disks into a number of
> filesystems.  It is standard for me to have a separate filesystem
> for /, /usr, /var, and /home.  It is a good standard these days that all
> configuration files live in /etc/<application>/ (it make them easy to
> find).  I also like having variable data files (like the database files
> for mySQL) in /var/<somewhere>.  So how are you going to layout the
> filesystem images?

One filesystem. 

I understand while you break filesystems up into partitions or
different volumes.

But there is no need to in a virtualized environment.


Clearly, you could use one of my filesystems as a source and pull the
changes out of it into your own filesystem structure.

Or just run some sort of virtualization (even chroot) on the fs.


As an aside, when I do virtualization with chroot the filesystems I
use go into /var/local/fs so I often have services running in jails
like this:

   chroot /var/local/fs/debian_sarge_bind /etc/init.d/bind9 start

   chroot /var/local/fs/sles9 /etc/init.d/apache2 start


-- 
Nic Ferrier
http://www.tapsellferrier.co.uk   for all your tapsell ferrier needs