Stollen for Riapants [sic]

And nicked by me from kdsorceress.

• Post ten of any pictures currently on your hard drive that you think are self-expressive.


• NO CAPTIONS!!! It must be like we're speaking with images and we have to interpret your visual language just like we have to interpret your words.


• They must ALREADY be on your hard drive - no googling or flickr! They have to have been saved to your folders sometime in the past. They must be something you've saved there because it resonated with you for some reason.


• You do NOT have to answer any questions about any of your pictures if you don't want to. You can make them as mysterious as you like. Or you can explain them away as much as you like.

Like kdsorceress, I'm happy to take questions/comments. You have the floor.

( here be pictures )

The woes of too-small partition virtual disks

I've been instructed to install our company's product, Velocity, at the customer's site. As the customer doesn't have network connectivity, I decided to create a virtual machine under Xen (which we're using because Oracle recommends it), install the software on that, get it configured and tested, then move the VM to the customer's site.

So far, so good.

It turns out there are two ways to create VMs. One is to install the OS from an ISO image, the other is to use a “VM template”. And the only way to gain hardware virtualization is to use a template. The templates come with already-built virtual disks. These virtual disks are small (4GB), and more space is intended to be added with additional virtual devices.

This is awkward, as it involves coordinating various hunks of virtual disk and keeping them together and in synch, as well as ferreting out all the necessary mount points so nothing overflows the small root filesystem.

Fortunately, I can use resize2fs to “grow” a filesystem while keeping its contents. Unfortunately, the virtual drive doesn't have room to do so. Fortunately, I can make it bigger by just tacking more space on the end (dd with the "seek" option can't really do it, so I have to make a sparse file with dd then concatenate that onto the virtual disk file).

The virtual disk, however, is partitioned. And the partition labels don't describe the additional space. So I attack it with fdisk and then parted. I figure I can just move the swap partition (whose contents are ephemeral and don't matter) to the (new) end, and then expand the root partition. Unfortunately, parted refuses to do this, as it performs the resize operation automatically with the partition expansion, and it complains that the filesystem contains options that are beyond its ability to resize (because Oracle runs SElinux).

( so then it degenerates into yak shaving... )

Fortunately (and perhaps frighteningly), I have experience writing disk formatters and partitioners.

EDIT: I wrote 'em, but can't do real testing with the 32-bit OEL here at home, so real testing will have to wait until tomorrow.