blog.jphoude.qc.ca

I recently needed to configure Xen guests on a CentOS server. I didn’t want to use CentOS/Redhat’s tool for several reasons : I don’t like the fact that it creates a “disk” with a whole partition table within the partition where you install it. Installing the guest directly on a LVM logical volume seems better to me (I may not be right, I’m still somewhat new to Xen!). Also, it was very instructive to do all the steps by myself rather than using a tool that does everything.

However, I had several problems while trying to install my first guest system, so it took me quite some time to find the right way to do it. I found a lot of documentation on the web, but nothing really described what I really wanted to do. So here we are, I decided to write a post describing what to do exactly to make a custom guest image and install it as a Xen domU.

In this first part, I will explain how to make an OS image of CentOS 5 that will be suited for Xen.

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At work we have several websites that we develop with Plone, but each year we make a new version and we want to keep an archive of the old version.

Since it takes a lot of memory to keep a Zope instance for these old websites that probably won’t need to be edited ever again, it makes sense to make a static copy of the website. It also eliminates the work needed to update the instance when security patches come out (and eliminates security risks, in cases of old versions that are no more maintained).

There are some tools that can help in this case; I chose to use wget, which is available in most Linux distributions by default.

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Hello!
This is my new website! I’ll post things that may be useful to other (and of course, to me, later!).

I also setup a dokuwiki-based wiki, where I note things that I want to remember later and that don’t really fit into blog posts… I still don’t know if I really need both and if I’ll find something to write here, but we’ll see