I am up and at it. Happy day after St. Patty’s Day. Only geek talk remaining in this post. First thing on today’s soft-schedule of tinkering with various Xen systems is to migrate the remaining web infrastructure from this box to another box on this box. Compartmentalize it. Slowly I have been spinning of different services to their own operating environements.. SQL, dns/proxy, VPN concentrator, NMS, VNC/remote toolbox, Mail, and of course web. It is exciting stuff. So much so, that I waste the first few minutes blogging away about it…
For sites like this one, I have a special ‘roles’ file created for the Debian xen-tools package that greatly simplifies creation of new Xen virtual machines, without the need to store a pre-configured image, or duplicate an existing one. Not that using xen-duplicate-image is more than trivial; It just seems more socially responsible to conserve the disk space.
One quick command … xen-create-image –ip=x.x.x.x and –host=webian –role=galleryblog … What is that last parameter? It is just a role configuration file that identifies additional Debian packages in addition to the base system.. in this case, gallery2 and wordpress are some of the additions that come to mind. Storing a deployment template is much more efficient than a preconfigured image. It is worth noting, that with Debian, that same script configures various distributions including Sarge, Etch or Sid. A simple –dist=Sid would create something a little more akin to SuSE 11.
