Re: Providing official virtualisation images of Debian
Hi Tom, Kyle, Graziano and everybody,
thanks for your replies. I have studied the material you provided and
in parallell explored the use of debian-installer as an AMI itself. I
reported my first steps in my blog, but strangely it does not show yet
on Planet Debian.
http://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debiâneries/nuage/
It looks possible to run a pristine Debian istaller, without the need of
special preparative ways. I could start the Stable version (20110106+squeeze3)
and launch a SSH console using preseeding. In that case the login can not be
done using SSH keys, but Kyle's patch would solve that problem in later
releases.
This raises the question of whether it would be possible to also run a fully
pristine Debian sytem, without even the need of a cloud support package. Some
core packages would need to be adjusted, for instance to instruct the SSH
server to rotation of the SSH keys at the first boot, or to instruct the
default grub to refresh /boot/grub/menu.lst (hardcoded in PvGrub) when
installing a new kernel, …
Having official (DD-signed, for instance ?) Debian-Installer images in the
Amazon computer cloud looks definitely reachable, at least as elastic block
store AMIs (that is, stored as a block device, not in a S3 bucket). In
particular, despite the need to support at least two arches in at least five
regions, the cost would be low (only 1 Go per machine image), definitely in a
price range for which we would have good chances to be sponsored. And the
stable Debian-Installer has much less security updates and point releases as
the Stable release itself, which hopefully means a small work load.
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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