My work laptop hit end of life recently, and I received a replacement this week. This of course means the obligatory deletion-of-windows-xp and installion-of-a-real-OS (in this case the latest Foresight), which is a good thing considering I had troves from 37 labels on my last install.

I decided I wanted the entire hard disk image from my old lappy so that I could keep it around for some time, thus ensuring I won't lose any information. Now I could have grabbed a screwdriver and done some physical muckery to accomplish such a task, but that would be no fun. I found a much more novel experiment.

Attempt 1 involved a LiveCD. very direct. just boot off the CD, mount the hard disk and start moving bits over the network (easy because rPath LiveCDs ship with conary, making them extensible). This worked, but was heniously slow. I don't think it would have finished in a week.

So on to attempt 2. I took advantage of our PXE boot images. Of course all we have are anaconda install images, so I booted the latest rPath installation media in rescue mode. I then made a mount point and mounted tmpfs onto it. This gave me the ability to create a custom chroot of whatever I wanted directly in RAM. A quick install of tar and openssh-client later and I was off and running. After bind mounting my hard disk image into my new ram-chroot, I just tarred the contents of my entire hard disk and piped it through ssh.

Conary's dependency model is the real home run here. All told this took 78M of RAM to get the entire set of runtime dependencies needed to extract my hard disk.

(update: changed 78K to 78M. that's a silly typo)

Should have posted this follow-up much sooner, but I was pretty sick last week.

Bongo had booth 45 at the SoCal Linux Expo, which was the 8th to the 10th. I tried to get pictures, but alas I did not have access to my own camera. There is proof that Bongo was there.

SCaLE was a great chance to spread the word about Bongo. I think the biggest lesson learned would be to have some sort of informational flyer to hand out to the curious passerby.

One interesting outcome from SCaLE was that Bongo was invited to OLF.

We've been seeing a sustained download rate of the Bongo appliance of about 30 per day, so there has been some amount of continual interest in Bongo.

Bongo has reached its M3 milestone! and with the release of 0.3.0, we've updated the appliance. The appliance is now available in both 32 and 64 bit as well.

More information can be found at http://bongo-project.org/

Congrats Bongoteers!

SCaLE is fast approaching. I'll be manning the Bongo booth. If you're in the area, please stop by and say hi. Bongo is currently a featured appliance on rBuilder Online.

We just pushed mkinitrd 4.2.15-13. This has a neat little patch I cooked up for the world: ISO Label support. Until now, nash's mount-by-label functionality didn't support iso9660 volume labels. In short this means you can now use the kernel cmdline arg 'root=LABEL=MY_CD_ROM' (for user defined variations of MY_CD_ROM) to boot straight to a cd without knowing the device node ahead of time. This is mainly useful for a bootable CD looking itself up, but I'm sure there are other cute little uses I haven't thought of.

One caveat: Spaces in your ISO label might be a little painful to deal with, so I wouldn't recommend it. If you label your CD for example: "my cd rom", the mount by label functionality in nash can find it, but the kernel command line is space delimited.