sipb-xen-losetup: a half-sane way to use losetup You should use this instead of plain losetup; everything that uses this will at least not have races with other things using this. If it's missing a feature (e.g. a losetup argument) you want, it shouldn't be hard to add. svn path=/trunk/packages/sipb-xen-guest-installer/; revision=449
copying installer works now (maybe?) At least for the image 'ice3', which IIRC was created with /usr/sbin/sipb-xen-make-iso. It's an etch amd64 image. It also had to have package nullmailer installed, replacing exim4. svn path=/trunk/packages/sipb-xen-guest-installer/; revision=336
Prototype fast installer using a special guest. Rather than poke directly in the boot sector, partition table, etc, which caused so much pain last week (r231), we just dd the entire disk. Then we poke at the bits that need to change (like secrets, the hostname, the root password, the filesystem uuids). Since this poking is distribution-dependent, we want it to be supplied by the image, so to make that safe we run it in a VM. The plan is 1. source image is dd'd (in the host) to the target image 2. special copying-installer image is booted, with access to target and to a small image containing its arguments 3. copying-installer guest reads arguments, mounts target, runs a script with a well-known name in target, passing arguments. Bits I haven't done yet include - frob grub config in the copying-installer image so it boots with init = the copying-installer script (doing this manually for testing) - install script into copying-installer, or into my example image, in a sane automated way (they're checked into partial/ here) - all the tasks the image's script ought to actually carry out - make this all available from remctl and the web pages. svn path=/trunk/packages/sipb-xen-guest-installer/sipb-xen-guest-installer/; revision=245
prototype fast installer. To install a distribution on a new volume, we take an existing installed volume produced with sipb-xen-make-iso, and 1. copy GRUB's data with dd 2. frob the partition table with sfdisk, if the disk size is different 3. make the filesystem 4. twiddle the hostname and root password and whatever else 5. make the swap area 6. boot! In this prototype, steps 2 and 4 aren't implemented yet; steps 1, 3, and 5 all use numbers that come from what the sipb-xen-make-iso etch installer does rather than from actually reading the partition table; and the whole thing is just a program in /usr/sbin, not integrated into what remctl / the web app invoke. It all takes about thirty seconds (28.0s most recently), excluding the boot. svn path=/trunk/packages/sipb-xen-guest-installer/sipb-xen-guest-installer/; revision=231
postinst script, nicer pathnames, and read password hash from a file The postinst script has been tested by running it directly, but I still haven't attempted actually building and installing the package. svn path=/trunk/packages/sipb-xen-guest-installer/sipb-xen-guest-installer/; revision=221
Use temp directory, use DHCP, and live in sane paths. The partial/ tree is gone now. Files are in files/; the installer's persistent data will go in subtrees like /srv/guest-installer/etch/. Also, it magically takes only 15 minutes now. svn path=/trunk/packages/sipb-xen-guest-installer/sipb-xen-guest-installer/; revision=218