On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 01:15:21PM -0400, Mo Morsi wrote:
This makes use of snap [1] (my Masters project from 2008), a Python
bases system snapshot and restoration utility that uses the native
package management system (eg rpm/yum on Fedora, deb/apt-get on
Ubuntu, etc) to record which packages are installed on the system,
the files not tracked by the package management system, and the
files which have been changed since installation by the package
manager
Interesting project!
I looked at the code and tried to run it on a Fedora 16 VM. It didn't
work ("ERROR: Error instantiaing package system" -- apparently because
the yum API has changed/broken since it was written).
I have some questions about it ...
(a) How well did it work in practice?
(b) Do you save and restore non-file items, for example:
- bootloader configuration
- filesystem options
- partition layout, swap and LVM configuration
- extended attributes and ACLs for changed files
(c) I'm interested in making this a virt tool that could work on
guests, using libguestfs. We already have virt-inspector which
operates in the same area[2]. Is this something you're interested in?
I'm thinking this could generate descriptions of machines as a first
step. A second step might be to transform these into kickstart files
or puppet manifests.
Rich.
[1]
http://sourceforge.net/projects/snapshotter/ (will be moving
this to github at some point soon)
[2]
http://libguestfs.org/virt-inspector.1.html
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat
http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines. Supports shell scripting,
bindings from many languages.
http://libguestfs.org