Re: Hosting a GuixSD server on commodity hosting platforms, a journey

[Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>]

Marius Bakke writes:

> I've had the questionable privilege of working on Openstack for some
> time, and indeed have a GuixSD system running on it. I can tell you that
> any errors you see are not necessarily representative of what's
> happening in the back-end, although it does sound like the Rackspace GUI
> just spits out a generic message, instead of a flat-out lie..

Yeah it was pretty generic, so I have no idea what happened. :)

> The image I used was created by installing a bare-bones GuixSD to an LVM
> device (e.g. with Qemu), then dumping this with `dd` before first boot
> to create a "RAW" image. RAW is supported (required, actually) by Glance
> if Ceph is used as the backing storage, but Rackspace only supports VHD.

Interesting!

> I haven't looked into the fstab of the generated VM image, but it may be
> hard-coded to '/dev/vda' whereas Xen creates '/dev/xvda' (IIRC). Though
> it should at least try to boot if that was the case.

Yeah, my configuration was set up for /dev/sda I think.  I guess I could
do a system reconfigure switching it out to /dev/vda or whatever at
least minute... I dunno.

> My best advice is to try doing a normal install in a VM from the USB
> image (qcow2 probably works) and then convert it to the format your
> cloud platform expects, instead of booting the VM image directly. I used
> GPT with a "bios_grub" partition FWIW.

Out of curiosity, why do you think this would be an improvement?

> Make sure to use (title 'label) and appropriate FS labels, since the
> root device path may vary between cloud platforms.

Right, though labels might vary between platforms too, correct?

> On a vaguely related note, I'm slowly working on a "native" GuixSD
> hosting platform, where you will be able to submit (and share!)
> configuration files and get a VM and/or disk image back. It's still a
> long way off, but I could use some help building the web front-end once
> the back-end is ready. Feel free to contact me for more details :)

Now this I'm really interested in!  I'll ping you off-list to discuss
this more. :)