Maintaining Xen with FAI - Questions

[Henning Sprang]

On 11/30/06, Mario Bischof <mbischof at gmx.net> wrote:
>
> I have some basic questions about using xen with custom configuration.

Please only FAI related questions (this one still is halfway O.K.)....

> should you use a custom hypervisor as well? or could you use the one
> from debian?

I didn't try to use the Debian Hypervisor with selfmade Kernels. Your
mileage may vary trying this, I heard, it should work to run newer
Kernels on older Hypervisors.

>
> Since i've been using xen, i always built it from source with two
> custom kernels, but now as I want to use FAI to install my servers, I
> dont know exactly what should be wise to do, because all of the
> software has to be packaged into deb-files to install it.

I am not sure, but assume now you are talking about installing Xen
servers with FAI, not Xen VM's.

You don't need to package everything in debs for FAI. You can also
install tarball with scripts which reside in the files directory, or
download them with wget.

Aditionally, you can try creating a deb form the xen packages by
running the install.sh in dist with checkinstall.

And, as the dist/install dir in a xen build tree after make dist /
make world is nothing but an image of the filesystem hirarchy from /
that is copied into the system to be installed (maybe some small
things more), you can make a simple deb manually - it's really easy,
although not exactly debian-policy alike, to build a deb from such a
filesystem hirarchy like this:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Debian-Binary-Package-Building-HOWTO/


Henning