virtualbox.org

Heyya all;

I was wondering if anyone would want a tutorial on how to create a headless, diskless, boot-over-the-wire setup for multiple hosts with one control point that's web based with webmin, hacking phpvirtualbox, square pegs into round holes type of deal.

I did it 3 years ago. I did it again. I just now finished writing down all of the steps for an NFS, failover DRBD SAN, NIS, DHCP, TFTP, lots of bells and whistles that, well, work. It's not polished and it has about 30 procedures but you can knock it out bare-bones in a day.

This is just the final version before deployment. I can show more if anyone's interested, even a desktop video of the original VM host (used for configuring) booting and loading everything needed.

Sure, I don't see why not. If you've already done the work, go for it...

Cool, if there's interest in it.

There is one problem. Of course there is, there's always something, right? But this is new.

From what I found a few years ago was that the instances that I ran used tempfs, and /proc was there.

I reached out to the sourceforge group to see what's what for phpvirtualbox.

I did this before by script/bashing /proc to see what was actually running at that time. But something changed, not sure what. It works so far, but the one hurdle is making sure a host doesn't fire up a VM that's already fired up because BadThings(tm) happen.

I really think it's hidden in /proc now but if I can pass $(HOSTNAME) to it somehow for the PID I think that's the solution.

Otherwise everything friggin works. You do need to compile a kernel though. It depends on your hardware.

-SS