I've got a few ideas in my head that I'm going to toy around with when I get home tonight, but I thought I'd toss this concept out to the rest of you for some further insight...

Basically I'm planning to move myself away from Red Hat after their recent decision to shut down their support system.. I'm thinking either Debian or Gentoo... and before I shut down my existing Red Hat linode to experiment with a different distribution disturbing all my users - I decided to install vmWare on my workstation and install a couple different distros with different setups in virtual machines to see which method would work best. I'm experimenting with a few different MTA's and what not.

Now that I'm thinking about Debian - I went ahead and tar'd Chris's default disk image and plan to download it when I get home. All I need is a kernel to boot it up... Thought if I set it up right - I could configure the entire linode on my virtual machine here - and then just upload it when I'm ready so there will be next to no downtime

Ideas on how to easily set this up? Be nice to have a working backup here of my system anyway.

I think you might have a much much higher sucess rate if you setup UML at home. (I can assume your diskimage might have some "UML tendencies" that VMware simply wouldn't provide.)

And real men use Postfix. :^)

Sunny Dubey

If you wanted to go the UML route, there's only a small number of things that I do to a fresh install to make it work under UML, and none of them are specifically required -- more like Linode-isms.. I wouldn't suggest trying to get installers to run under UML, though, it's a royal PITA.

I mknod /dev/ubd[a-g][0-16] entries using UML's major/minor (98/0 16 per ubd drive) but you can get around this by feeding "ubd=3" to the UML command line. Only thing is, hd uses 32 minors per device.. So suddently your second (uml) drive becomes /dev/hda16.

The other thing I do is just for console access -- setup a getty on tty0 in /etc/inittab, and allow root to log in via tty0 in /etc/securetty.

Honestly -- that's all I can think of at the moment. Pretty easy.

Networking will give you problems.. Here's a great how-to I helped with a little (very little):

http://edeca.net/articles/bridging/

-Chris

as soon as i read sunny's msg i headed on over to the uml website and downloaded it... i must say this is easier than i thought it was gonna be... (at least it seems to be so far)

got the uml version of tom's rtbt going... i'll try using a real filesystem here shortly...

thanks you guys, been a big help!

thanks for your bridge doc there chris, helped me out a lot just now

i'm all up and running woohoo