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 :-)

I have a new lump of hardware on my desk, intended to be a household server. It's basically an Asus P5Q Pro motherboard, with a couple of SATA disks. With a few gig of RAM and a dual-core processor, it is intended to be a virtual machine server, running a firewall, MythTV/media archive, and some public sites.

VMWare ESXi was going to be the base OS; it's “free as in beer”, it's going to be used on some of the company systems I'm installing this year, it provides a nice and secure base OS and virtual networking that would make separation of different guests easy.

However, I didn't check the hardware compatability of ESXi before getting all enthuiastic. VMWare do use Linux under the hood, but I guess in the interests of reducing support issues, have only kept drivers for the most enterprise-class devices that they expect to see in the datacentre.

This means that although the P5Q has a supportable SATA device, by default ESXi doesn't recognise it. You have to hack both the ESXi installer, and the installed image to get it to work.

Also, ESXi does not recognise the onboard Atheros network interface, which means that it cannot be available for any of the guest machines. I would have to buy a supported NIC for my machine; that's basically an Intel one. It would have to be PCI-Express, as those are the only ports free. That puts the price up to around 40% of the entire of the rest of the server.

Sorry, ESXi 3.5. If you get wider hardware support, I may install you. Otherwise, it's off to Ubuntu and KVM …