Hi Andreas, Mike is definitely more qualified to give an answer, but I've been through a bit of this before from the end-user perspective on customizing the CentOS dom0, and so I'll add -
Mike is sure right about policy-wise, it's not the best idea to generally go nuts using yum etc customizing the dom0, however, if you're limiting your changes to a few specific things like what you've listed below, where you can be sure it's not interfering with the dom0's setup, we've never had trouble for what it's worth. I use nagios NRPE and hardware raid monitoring on all of our XenServer (same as XCP effectively) dom0's without any trouble. e.g. when I first installed nrpe I penned up this wiki article: http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/NagiosXCP When we want to install a yum package, we check the package contents to ensure it's not going to interfere with the dom0, and run a once-off command like: yum --enablerepo=base --disablerepo=citrix install screen Networking bonding is built-in to the base system already and can be easily configured from XenCenter or the CLI. The main thing is to keep the changes simple and to acknowledge that if you upgrade the dom0 for a future release you'll lose all of your customizations, so we keep a run-sheet and ensure the changes are all nice-to-haves, like nagios, as opposed to being something critical to it's basic operation. Cheers, Andrew On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 12:45 PM, Andreas Hilboll <[email protected]> wrote: > Mike, > > thanks for your answer! > > > It's true that XCP 1.6 is based on CentOS 5.7. However, XCP is a highly > > customized version of CentOS, and should really be thought of as a > > standalone Linux distribution, and not just some apps built on top of > > CentOS. For instance, while it is possible to install software in XCP > > via yum, it is not encouraged to do so, as running a command like 'yum > > upgrade' would overwrite important custom software, like LVM. > > Can I get a list of packages available in the XCP iso install? I think > the really important points where I believe having a "regular" CentOS > would be beneficial are: > > a.) monitoring of the hardware RAID (via the CLI available at > http://www.areca.us/support/s_linux/cli/linuxcli_V1.10.0_120815.zip, and > optionally the HTTP interface available at > http://www.areca.us/support/s_linux/http/linuxhttp_V2.2.3_120815.zip and > the SNMP agent available at > http://www.areca.us/support/s_linux/snmp/linuxsnmp_V4.1_110113.zip) > b.) bonding of the two ethernet interfaces for having better performance > c.) nagios/icinga agent > c.) having rsync available > d.) having rsnapshot available > > Well, actually, a.) and b.) and c.) are important, and d.) and e.) would > be nice-to-have. > > Would you recommend going the XCP iso way with these requirements? Maybe > some of the points are no problem, because they're already available in > XCP iso. Your comments are greatly appreciated! > > > Basically, the XCP iso is meant to be treated as a "black box" style > > appliance which isn't supposed to be mucked about with (unless you know > > what you're doing!). If you're willing to play around with getting > > Puppet to work with XCP, I would be ever grateful to you for writing up > > a HOWTO on the wiki. But I expect you might need to do a bit of > > tinkering, because XCP won't act like your standard CentOS install. > > If I actually do something like this, I will of course make it publicly > available and let you guys know! > > > The XCP toolstack packages (xcp-xapi and its dependencies) were meant to > > serve the purpose of a hackable installation of XCP. Unfortunately, the > > current state of XCP toolstack packages is not where we'd like them to > > be. The code in the current release is a snapshot from somewhere > > directly after the 1.5 beta was released, and hasn't been updated yet. > > We're planning on getting snapshots from the 1.6 branch up and running > > soon, but it probably won't happen until around March next year. > > Good to know, thanks for the info! > > Cheers, Andreas. > > > _______________________________________________ > Xen-api mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.xen.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xen-api >
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