Last night I reinstalled Debian GNU/Linux upon my laptop so that I could have a clean starting point and a simple LVM setup. Why? Well xen-tools has had half-hearted LVM support for a few months, but not complete. And waiting for other people to add fixes has become unbearable.

So now I have a 7Gb root partition and a 12Gb LVM group which can be used to create new Xen instances upon. (Or for anything else I guess!)

Speaking of Xen Tools. Yesterday was a major day of work. I've split up the code from one monolithic script xen-create-image into three simpler programs which are called in turn:

• xt-install-image
  • This will install a new distribution either via a copy, an untarring operation, rpmstrap, or debootstrap. Adding new installation mechanisms should be trivial.
• xt-customise-image
  • This script determines the which collection of shell scripts (or "hooks") to execute, and runs them in order. These scripts can do arbitary things but all they are supposed to do is setup networking and install openSSH.
• xt-create-xen-config
  • This creates the Xen configuration file in /etc/xen.

All these changes took a few hours, but it was mostly a simple job of moving code around and adding consistant debugging output rather than adding anything new.

I'm going to have to improve documentation, write manpages, etc, before this becomes the 2.x release. Still I've been working on a pretty website and I've made some pretty webpages which will go live at the same time.

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