Lone Coder: VirtualBox on Vista with a Gentoo Guest

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

Jamon Camisso wrote:
> Ken Burtch wrote:
>> Based on experience, the cost of installing Gentoo on VirtualBox was 
>> signficantly higher that installing Fedora, especially when Fedora 
>> supports VirtualBox right "out of the box" and Gentoo does not.
> 
> If speaking about costs, as you've discovered there can be time costs up 
> front. But now you know how the system works, don't have to do it again, 
> and have an article to show for it. Not bad in my estimation.

You don't ever have to reinstall Gentoo... until you do. Gentoo is a 
useful learning tool but I don't have much use for it beyond that. 
Granted, you don't have glibc changes that require *everything*, 
including the build toolchain, be rebuilt all over again all the time 
but when it happens, the results are non-deterministic, or at least they 
were up to two or three years ago. It didn't take me long to find tales 
of woe on the Gentoo forums about how many passes people had to make 
rebuilding things (and one more for good measure!) to (maybe) get 
everything rebuilt and working. No thanks. I'll pass. Gentoo is nice if 
you want to create a custom distro that only you can (maybe) maintain.

> Now that you've seen there are different ways to get Gentoo setup, try 
> debootstrap and build a Debian system that way. My guess is that you 
> won't be so put off by Gentoo's method :) That said, I pretty much only 
> use debootstrap for new installs since it is so easy once you get the 
> hang of it. The best part is that Fedora, Gentoo and others all include 
> it so I can Debianize practically any system. Sweet!

Debootstrap in a virtual machine is an excellent way of deploying Debian 
or its derivatives. That how we deploy both in Xen and OpenVZ virtual 
machines in our hosting environment.

Gentoo and Debian fans criticize Red Hat and derivatives because it 
(supposedly) can't be upgraded in situ as Gentoo and Debian (supposedly) 
can be. I've upgraded Fedora servers but I prefer to "nuke 'n pave", 
especially since it's so trivially easy to do with Cobbler 
<https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/>. I've upgraded Debian and Ubuntu 
servers where I typically don't install X and a desktop manager or such 
and it worked as advertised. Desktop machines are a different story, no 
matter what the distro. With the big changes in KDE, for example, 
upgrading really doesn't get you much since there is no way to migrate 
some (many?) of the config files anyway.

Let me just expand on Cobbler. Last week, I was at a client where I 
demonstrated a hands-off, bare metal installation of CentOS 5.3, over 
PXE. From selecting the PXE menu option to having a machine that was 
ready for use, it was about 20 minutes, and that included creating 
filesystems on a 1TB disk presented by hardware RAID. (The RAID set had 
been created prior to the installation. It was left running over the 
weekend building the array.)

Once we had the working CentOS machine, to create another CentOS 
installation in a Xen virtual machine was a matter of running "koan" and 
pulling a kickstart installation from the Cobbler server. That took 
another 10 minutes. By contrast, the first Xen installation I did back 
in 2005, took me a *week*.

I believe the Cobbler approach, particularly if it's used in conjunction 
with a configuration management system like bcfg2, cfengine, puppet, 
chef, etc., is a far better solution to systems management than doing in 
situ upgrades and ad hoc systems administration that often accompanies 
that practice. If the cost of recreating the environment is so high that 
you value in situ major upgrades over bare metal installations, you have 
a problem. You most likely have an environment that can't be replicated 
in a reasonable amount of time, if it can be replicated at all, which 
does not bode well for disaster recovery.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis
1419-3266 Yonge St.
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

<http://dinamis.com>
+1 416-410-3326
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