[fedora-virt] libguestfs best practices: Exposing files from the host for the duration of a session

[Michael Ansel]

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 8:19 PM, Charles Duffy <charles at dyfis.net> wrote:
> I have a rather large set of RPMs and such on my host I want to install on
> my guest using libguestfs. The normal way to do this would be to upload the
> package(s), install them, then (optionally) remove the RPMs.
>
> However, I don't particularly want to bloat the qcow2 file with the changes
> made via uploading files which are only going to be deleted when no longer
> in use. Someday (*sigh*) we'll have 9p-over-virtio support built into qemu;
> until then, a few ways to get around this present themselves:
>


What about setting up a temporary NFS export on the host and mounting
that on the guest? I've done installs using yum/rpm directly from the
NFS mount, eliminating the need to ever copy the RPMs into anything
more than working memory. If network security is an issue, I'm sure
you could use a combination of iptables rules and NFS export options
to limit access to that single box as well (though, I haven't done
that one).

Here's to hoping I didn't miss something blatantly obvious...

Michael