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Toolstacks (a.k.a toolkits and toolboxes)
There are several toolstacks A toolstack is a set of user-space tools used for adminstering Xen.
Several toolstacks are available for the personal interactive or scripted administration of Xen resources.
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Creating Debian DomUs
debootstrap
TODO: determine if it creates a new installation based on the existing installation (that would not be desirable if we want to have all our Debians as standard and the Dom0 is a Hetzner customised Debian).
TODO: determine whether debootstrap's single repo limitation would be significant for us.
References:
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Installs into a chroot. Can use only one repository (which may be a local cache).
References:
- Debian WIKI: https://wiki.debian.org/Debootstrap
Installing new Debian systems with debootstrap (2006): http://www.debian-administration.org/article/426/Installing_new_Debian_systems_with_debootstrap
Installing Debian GNU/Linux from a Unix/Linux System: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/apds03.html.en
Debian installer
Is "Debian installer" is the standard Debian installation methodsystem; it supports installation of standard Debian as a Xen PV.Note:
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If we use either of the Debian installer methods, pre-seeding would be advantageous both for creating installations that differ only as intended and – more importantly – to accelerate re-installation during disaster recovery. This might be very useful for all Debian and ubuntu installations, not just DomUs. |
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Reference: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/apb.html.en. |
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Actually FAI (http://fai-project.org/ and BLUE-1325) is the way to go but it will take too long to familiarise with it. Even pre-seeding is non-trivial so decided not to delay the first installation by using it. |
References:
- http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Debian_Guest_Installation_Using_Debian_Installer
- Debian GNU/Linux Installation Guide (Wheezy 64-bit version): http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/
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http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ch04s05.html.en
.iso image
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Installing from a .iso image is the method we are most familiar with so a good choice, at least for the first DomUs.
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24 July 2014 Decided to install from a .iso rather than any of the other choices because:
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xen-create-image (from xen-tools)
xen-create-image is part of the xen-tools package. TODO: does it build the image from Dom0's OS? If so we might prefer not to use it because Dom0 was installed from the Hetzner Debian image and an uncustomised Debian may be preferable.
When creating Debian systems it uses debbootsrap (described above).
Troubleshooting
TODO: integrate the next para.
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