Re: Debian on Azure - vmdepot
Stefano Zacchiroli <leader@debian.org> writes:
Hi,
[...]
>> When creating a new VM with the azure create vm command, you can pass
>> the --verbose flag. It will show you the location of the VHD image
>> used to provision the VM. You can simply wget that location, and
>> you'll have a vhd file that you can mount. It won't be useable as a
>> system disk because there's no user provisioned, but you can inspect
>> its content. I just did these steps for the version currently
>> available (selecting North Europe datacenter), here is the location :
>> http://vmdepotneurope.blob.core.windows.net/linux-community-store/community-17-50526934-193e-480f-ac4c-35429a0dc2f2-1.vhd
>
> Great, thanks! I'm downloading it while writing this. It's a bit
> unfortunate that it's huge (10 Gb), so I suspect I'm downloading also
> the "free space" on the disk, something that's avoided with other
> formats, at least when the disk is still untouched. If you've any tips
> on how to avoid that, assuming it's feasible, please let us know.
afaik, only vhd file format is supported, which means that one has to
download the whole thing. There's a slightly different file format
called vhd-x (x stands for extensible) but it's not supported.
>
>> That VHD is a normal vhd file. A quick search points to vdfuse to
>> mount VHDs on a Linux box, but I have no direct experience on this.
>
> /me nods. I'll try with that.
You can also convert the vhd file to other formats with qemu-img
(disclaimer: I've tested the other way around: creating a .img and
converting it to vhd to check if it was working fine on Azure).
>
>> > What is the "azure" command I see in there? Is it something
>> > DFSG-free or not? If not, we'll have to consider the Azure images
>> > non-free as they cannot be built with an entirely free
>> > toolchain. Comments and guidance are very welcome!
>>
>> The azure command-line tool sources are at
>> https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-tools-xplat and its license
>> is Apache version 2.0. This tool is the simplest way to create a new
>> VM from an existing image, but you don't need it to build the image.
>
> Thanks for the pointer! Is anyone here interested in packaging it? I'm
> personally not, but I think we should strive to package the stuff we use
> to build Debian. So if noone is interested at present, I think we should
> at least file an RFP to avoid forgetting about this.
fwiw, it requires node-js 0.8.16. node-js devs are working on 0.8.11 for
experimental [1] but it won't work. Also, a lot of dependencies are
probably lacking.
>
>
> Thanks a lot for your help, Pierre!
>
> I'd still like to hear back from people who have worked on the Azure VM
> about the "Debian Wheezy" naming. It's a pretty important issue, even
> though it is so only for the time being.
It's quite easy to change the image name so as long as there's an
agreement on the name to use, it can be changed in few mins/hours.
Arnaud
[1] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/nodejs.git
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