[Fedora-xen] Xen Guest Installation question

[John Summerfield]

Lamont Peterson wrote:
> On Tuesday 01 May 2007 09:05am, Willemann, Phil wrote:
>> Hello Everyone:
>>
>> I'm new to Xen and have some Linux experience.  I have installed Fedora
>> Core 6 on a Intel 3.2 GHZ machine. (Note:  I have 1 machine to test
>> with.)  I have 6GB of RAM.  My ultimate goal is to install a few
>> versions of Fedora Core 3 on the box.  (I have an old application that
>> uses FC3)  I can start up the virt-install GUI with no problems.  My
>> questions revolve around the location of FC3.
>>
>> 1.  I know it can't be installed from a FC3 Install CD.  <-- I don't
>> understand why this is not supported.  It would seem to be the easiest
>> thing to do.
>> 2.  I know I can use NFS or HTTP.
>> 3.  I have Apache Web Server running and NFS is enabled.
>>
>> Here are the questions
>>
>> 1.  If I want to use http or NFS, do I copy the entire FC3 Install CD to
>> some place on the hard drive?  Is the copy a *.iso file or is it the
>> individual          files from the CD?  This has never been clear for
>> me.  I have seen conflicting information on the net about this
> 
> Either.
> 
> You can copy all files from each CD turn into a directory and share that via 
> NFS or HTTP (or FTP) for network installs. To copy the CDs, mount them one by 
> one, 
> run "cp -a /media/cdrom/* /wherever/you/want/it/", "umount /media/cdrom/", do 
> the same with the next CD and so on until they are all copied over.  Make 
> sure to use the same destination directory for the cp command every time. 
> Substitute whatever path your CD/DVD drive mounts at for /media/cdrom/ if 
> that's not the right value.

I am sure this does not work well with the advent of yum repos on 
install media. It's okay if you have a DVD image (there is only one), 
but from CD there will be problems.

I've not yet see documentation, but I think a createrepo command will 
fix it.

BUT, the files will be ro, so something like this would be the go:
find <newrepo> -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find <newrepo> ! -type d -exec chmod 644 {} \;

Let's not have the xargs argument today, okay? Just to show I know, you 
might also want this:
find <newrepo> -name TRANS.TBL -print0 \
   | xargs -0 rm -f --no-run-if-empty


Also, there are (probably) some filenames duplicated*, so the original 
cp might be
cp -f <etc>

The find ... xargs ... removes those I know about.


> 
> As of Red Hat Linux 7.2 (IIRC), which is a long time ago now, you can also 
> just place the .iso images of the CDs (or of the DVD) in a directory and do 
> NFS network installs (HTTP and FTP do not support this).
> 
>> 2.  If I use http where do I put the files. (under /var/www/...??)
> 
> If you're not familiar with how to configure Apache, you should probably just 
> use NFS (it gives better performance anyway).  The other option is to create 
> a subdirectory under /var/www/html/ (on Red Hat, /var/www/htdocs/ 
> or /srv/www/htdocs/ on almost all other systems) on the web server computer 
> you want to use and then put the contents of the CDs in there

This is one way. I configure a virtual host for each distro, so each has 
its own name space.

Placing the tree outside /var/www is possible, but selinux steps on your 
toes.


> 
>> 3.  I made a directory called /tmptest and copied the iso image to it.
>> I edited the /etc/exports file and added a line like this
>>     /tmptest   192.168.107.14(rw,sync)  <-- I assumed this means


I prefer not to litter the root directory; I generally use /var/local 
(and sometimes have a whole disk there), others (I think) use /local

> 
> There is no reason to make it rw, use ro for something like this.  It's 
> important security-wise.

I managed to delete lots that way once; I was using the then-new (but 
not mine I hasten to add) script to create a rescue compact disk, and it 
had to be run as root. There was a bug in it.... It's saner now.

> 
>> 192.168.107.14 has rw write access to /tmptest.
> 
> Try using:
> 
> /tmptest   *(ro,sync)
> 
> The "192.168.107.14" in there would mean that that IP address would be the 
> only permitted client.  Plus, if this is ro (which is important for 
> security), then there's no reason to limit which clients can connect to the 
> NFS server at the NFS server, unless you have troubles with people using your 
> install source and hogging bandwidth.
> 
>> This seems to make 
>> sense but the installation seems to always say invalid NFS source.
>>
>> Any help would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> HTH.
> 
> 
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-- 

Cheers
John

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