Re: [Serusers] SIP Express Bundle - let's get started

This goes in on the top as a general comment to more than one person. I agree that locking into one virtual imaging technology or format is not a good thing when it comes to reaching as many people as possible. Through the work on SER - Getting Started incl config files + the config buildsystem + non-iptel.org work maintaing OS images, I have really experienced the pain and costs of multi-option projects and how manual operations explode in such a setting. I have thus started to hate everything that cannot be scripted. Hence, I have researched the various options we have and I believe we have a possibility of scripting nearly everything we need, from the installation of the OS through tailoring, iptel.org installations and configurations. I post below a comment I added to the project page (which I now have incorporated into the project page as "Scripted installation"). g-) I found a way to possibly automate and create Amazon ECC and vmware images (possibly also xen) for both centos and ubuntu (if we want to). Steps: Use a linux vmware machine (with apt and/or yum installed). Bootstrap a new OS installation into either a dd image or a physical (empty) disk using the same principles found in the scripts used by Rightscale (http://info.rightscale.com/content/rightimages-changelog, btw, Rightscale, thanks for publishing the scripts!). Make sure that the script has sections for installing both vmware tools and Amazon stuff (with a selection), and Xen if needed. Upload the image to Amazon S3 if that was the target ...or create vmdk file for vmware either by using qemu-img or http://liveview.sourceforge.net/ or by simply run the whole process inside a vmware virtual machine and not use dd, but a virtual disk as target for the OS bootstrap (voila! you already have a vmdk file) A dd image should also be easy to convert to Xen or even into a bootable partition (I guess those who wants this know how to do it...) The script bootstrapping the OS installation can also install and configure all iptel.org software. I believe that if we force ourselves to put all steps into a script, we will benefit greatly the next time we update the virtual machine, and the script itself documents all the details of the virtual machine.