Subject: Re: [vserver] alpine-vserver, a minimal vserver host distro
From: "Michael S. Zick" <mszick@morethan.org>
Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2010 09:46:35 -0600

On Wed February 3 2010, Natanael Copa wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm (finally) creating an alpine-vserver iso for a minimal (32bit)
> vserver host distro. The idea is that you can run the host from cdrom,
> usb, cf (or install to disk if wanted) and then mount /vservers dir to
> a disk array and run the vservers from there. You could even run your
> guests from tmpfs if you had enough ram and are ok to lose them during
> next reboot.
> 

Long time, no hear. . .
Good to hear you and alpine-linux are alive and well.

> In addidion to the base system uclibc, busybox, apk-tools (package
> manager) and util-vserver, what more packages would be interesting to
> have on the iso?
> 
> I'm thinking of:
> 
> openntpd
> openssh

Perhaps use Dropbear instead if size is a concern.

> shorewall
> e2fsprogs
> xfsprogs

Not a good idea if there is a chance of losing power without properly
flushing and closing any persistent files on xfs (or ext4).
These file systems get their speed by buffering a very large amount of
meta-data - a simple power-off or other power loss guarantees non-recovery.

> mdadm
> lvm2
> 
> Anything else?
> 

How about NFS and CIFS (Samba) tools?

Mike