[Umlbuilder-devel] Re: UML Builder futures

[Steve F. <sf...@ih...>]

> I've noticed the same thing on real hardware.  The new Linux distributions
> are getting faster.  (I assume compiling against i586/i686 is helping
> amongst other things).

Yeah, I grabbed some stuff over 100baseT via FTP and actually got slightly
better speed under the UML than on the host. Since webserving is usually not
a highly CPU-intensive task, this tells me that UML is plenty fast enough,
at least for my types of needs.

However, this isn't in jailed mode, which will be a practical "must," as
soon as the speed problems with it are solved.

> Ideally I would like it to be come obsolete because UML would just run
> the native installers, and everything would "just work".  (Ok, so that
> would never happen :-)

Good to see writing this thing hasn't cost you your sense of humor. :-)

> I want to solve this a different way.  I would like there to be a file
> in /etc that lists what ip addresses a user can have, which uml_net
> enforces.

Yes! That's a killer way to solve it.

>> * Attach ttys to host's IP ports over sshd, so startup and running of UMLs
>> is effectively silent.
>> * In conjunction with the above, an addition to control script that directs
>> stdout to a logfile?

And I had another idea in conjunction with these. If you've got the UML
startup silent, and TTYs to TCP/IP, how about adding a SysV-type script that
will fire up the UMLs on host bootup, and cleanly shut them down on host
shutdown?

For this you'd need to set CAD to hit the right runlevel, of course.

>> * Ext3 support.
> 
> It actually already does.  Add 'ext3' to the 'supportedfs' list in the
> profile.

Cool! Thanks!

> I generally take the attitude that I only "support" what is in the standard
> UML RPM produced by Jeff.

That makes a lot of sense.

> (The testing is fun.  There is an automatic test generator script that grovels
> through my collection of rpms and does the installation.  I then have to dig
> through all the log files to ensure it went ok.  Finally I have to run each
> one and login, scrutinise start messages etc.  A single tweak in the main
> code then requires this whole process again, as some distributions are very
> temperamental about installation order, files/directories that already exist,
> contents of /proc etc).

Any way to automate this? Perhaps, if you're dumping the UML to a logfile,
you could run a diff between the last time you ran the test and this time.
Then hopefully you could scan for changes quickly.

>> * An ability to add "basic utils" to base install, like ftp, ncftp, wget,
>> lynx, lsof, emacs-nox, sshd, etc.
> 
> Everyone's definition of "basic utils" differs though.  I figure this will
> be covered by 505686.

True. But in the interim, I'd think adding ftp is justifiable, no? As it
stands, I don't really know any way to get "out" from a base UML install to
install additional packages, without adding ftp or the like from outside. Am
I missing something?

> It was a great relief when I originally worked on this since I really didn't
> want to allocate two IPs for UML session.

Yes, and it's a great relief to me. IPs ain't easy to get these days. I just
read the docs, and I see now that it mentions that you can re-use the host
IP if you're short on IPs. Are there any advantages of not re-using the host
IP? Such as being able to actually ping the UML itself?

> - Cope with upgrades of UML itself (install new modules, generate new
> initrd)

Yes, that'd be neat. Then I can easily add non-compiled modules. I suppose
it'll require Jeff to start distributing the modules that are compiled with
each new UML release, no?

> Longer term I want to make it complement UML features.  For example I
> anticipate that UML will eventually have the ability to save its memory
> out so that you can "suspend" a session.  UML Builder can provide a
> nice easy to use interface to that sort of thing.

That sounds cool. I imagine a Webmin interface for UMLs that provides a lot
of the same services. Like something that:

* Lets you run the same CLI command on all your UMLs
* Has a networking "wizard" that lets you configure common cases
* Works with Webmin's monitoring suite to make sure the UMLs stay online
* Can back them all up
* Can harvest logs and produce reports
* Etc...

Steve