iNode: Nota Bene

I've long had /etc checked in to version control on my machines, especially where there are multiple administrators – it makes life easier, having visibility of configuration changes!

I've just set up a new server, and this time I'm trying Mercurial as the versioning system, for the simple reason that it keeps the repository data in a single directory (unlike subversion).

Starting with instructions at http://tinyurl.com/mikas-hg, I came up with this :-

• Install the base OS
• Do any update / upgrade to get yourself current
• Install Mercurial
• Decide on the list of files in /etc that should not be versioned
• • I tend to exclude things like SSL and SSH keys, as I often publish the repository later
• Add and check in!

root@box:~# aptitude install mercurial
...
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  mercurial mercurial-common{a} python-beaker{a} python-sqlalchemy{a} rcs{a}
...

root@box:~# cd /etc
root@box:/etc# hg init
root@box:/etc# chmod 700 .hg

root@box:/etc# cat > .hgignore
(^)*.dpkg-new
(^)*.dpkg-old
(^)blkid.tab(|.old)
(^)mtab
(^)adjtime
(^)ssl/private/*
(^)ssh/ssh*key
(^)ld.so.cache
(^)passwd-
(^)group-
(^)shadow-
(^)gshadow-

root@box:/etc# hg add
adding .hgignore
adding ...

root@box:/etc# hg ci -m "Initial post-install checkin"
No username found, using 'root@box' instead

My next step is generally to install Trac (with the mercurial plugin), and then I have a great platform for multiple administrators to co-operate, track changes, keep notes and raise tickets on each other!

I'm not especially happy with Ubuntu today.

It's probably nothing serious, and I'm sure I could work around it if I needed to, but …

The Ubuntu 8.10 Server installer won't run from a USB disk, despite the best efforts of Unetbootin and other more manual hackery. So I have to burn a CD …

The installer won't recognise my atl1e NIC, although the base OS does. So I have to do all the network config afterwards by hand :-)

And worse than that, Xen dom0 support has been removed. So if I want Xen I'll have to step outside the repository support and do it myself …

I did briefly try Debian Lenny, but couldn't get the Xen kernel to load with GRUB – my kernel seems to be “too big” and the bootloader won't install without a “BIOS Boot Partition” … and I can't find any way of creating one of those! That seems to be one of the punishments for using LVM on top of RAID in my boot partition :-)