Re: [Xen-users] Convert CentOS system to Xen image?

[Igor Chubin <igor@xxxxxxx>]

...
> > Or you've said 
> > <
> > > by with rsync. I have found though that the time to
> > > get rsync going efficiently doesn't pay for a one
> > >
> > about setup time?
> > 
> > rsync installation is very quick.
> > It's enough to simply install rsync package
> > and then you can run it (it uses ssh as transport).
> 
> I was unaware that you didn't need to setup an rsync
> daemon on the other end and configure security.


You need daemon in anonymous mode only.
Except this mode, rsync uses transport (ssh by default
and -e /some/path/to/program if specified).


> 
> Then sure I guess rsync would be quicker, does it
> preserve special files, pipes, symlinks and sparse
> files properly?


Yes.
All of them (use -a key for that).


> 
> > > I have been playing around with the idea of using
> > > something like 'revisor' from Fedora to capture
> > > the basic system settings and packages into a
> > > kickstart install iso that you can use to install
> > > a PV that's identical to the source. Have it do
> > > an RPM audit of all config files except a few
> > > key ones like fstab, ifcfg etc and such and tar
> > > those up and have it extracted in the %post
> > > section of the kickstart... It's an interesting
> > > idea... Hmmm
> > 
> > Really interesting idea. Thank you for it.
> > 
> > 
> > I'm looking for the way how I can 
> > automagically (without rsyncing, dumping and another big
> > data transfers) create clone of a system 
> > from standard repositories.
> > 
> > 
> > Your idea is to package configs delta between
> > current system (that we want to clone) and fresh system
> > installed from repo state.
> > 
> > 
> > Cloned system configs - fresh system configs => delta.rpm
> > 
> > 
> > And after installing delta.rpm into fresh system 
> > we will have system that will be equal to cloned.
> > 
> > Correct?
> 
> Well my idea for the configs was more rudimentary, but
> your idea of a delta RPM is perfect! What is the tool
> used for creating delta RPMs? All one would need is
> to create a list of configs that should never be
> packaged and create a delta RPM of all the others...

I'm not rpm guru (I use debian), but I have just googled
and found what we need (at least it's very like to it).


The tool name is deltarpm :)

More info here [1].



[1] 
http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/doc/suse/suse9.3/suselinux-adminguide_en/sec.rpm.html

> 
> Then once you have the delta RPM you add it to the
> list of RPMs included in the revisor spin and voila!


Yes.

> 
> Hmmm, I suppose when it comes to the actual data you could
> do a number of things like tar or cpio to a series of
> DVD images. Maybe some dvd authoring tool can help automate
> this process... You would need some interesting method to
> find all the data though as not all data is in easily
> identifiable locations like home. An example of this
> would be the samba tdb files like passdb.tdb and
> secrets.tdb, which are created after install and aren't
> included in the catalog.



The idea was about configs, not about data actually.


Of course, if you want to migrate file server or DBMS system, 
rpm delta is not enough.


> 
> -Ross
> 
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-- 
WBR, i.m.chubin


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