Problem, suggestion, and a question
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milksop
Joined: 2006-09-09
Posts: 2 |
Posted: Sat, 2006-09-09 06:10
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Hi One problem I had with the Appliance and a suggestion: I followed these instructions http://codex.gallery2.org/index.php/Gallery:Appliance (almost...) but didn't touch /etc/gallery-pre-configured, because I didn't have any intention of running any reconfigure command. I used the applicance for a day or 2, uploaded around a thousand pictures, and then decided I wanted to up the memory allocation in the VM, did so, and rebooted to make it take effect. And BAM, my database got nuked. Bleh. So, my suggestion is to take the auto reconfigure out of the init script. If there's some reasonable reason to have it in there, then I think the file that's touched should be one that _makes_ the reconfigure happen, rather than causes it to not happen. The 'setup' should do a setup and delete the file. Now, to my question. I've started over, and uploaded couple thousand pictures, and all of a sudden I'm getting upload failed errors. I was a little confused at first, but it turns out that the virtual hard drive is full, according to 'df'. Is there a way to resize the hd? (Please tell me there is!). I'm using VMware Player on WinXP. If there's no way to resize the disk, then the limit of about a 1gig of pictures should definitely be mentioned prominently on the docs for the Applicance, since it means that it's not really too useful for actual usage (though obviously ok for demo purposes). thanks, |
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Posts: 3236
Hey, great feed back.
Currently, the script is what pre-configures everything at boot. I could look into having the file exist before first boot, then be removed. I think you are right, that would reverse the logic but make it less likely to have happen what happened to you.
When I create the vmware player image on rpath, I can choose an amount of freespace. I can up it, if you think it would be a good idea. I do not think it increases the file size on disk or downloaded any, so it probably isn't a bad idea. It is probably around 500mb now? What do you think would be a good amount? 5G might be okay?
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Posts: 2
Hi
The harddrive is 1.3gig according to 'df', but not sure how much of that was taken up by OS/software.
If it doesn't cause the image to get much bigger until the space is used (which is what it appears to be by looking at the VMware docs), I would make it much larger. I think the Appliance should be the no-configuration-problems version of Gallery, and after spending the evening trying to resize the harddrive, I don't think you want the "typical user" having to do that. I'd say something like 50-100G.
I wasn't able to successfully resize the harddrive, incidentally. Actually, that's not quite true, I resized the harddrive, but couldn't resize the partition. 'parted' doesn't seem to work, and gives a fairly obscure error. Not sure if that's because of rpath, or because of vmware, or just that I don't know what I'm doing though.
Posts: 13451
While increasing the potential disk space utilized by the VM, we could run into problems down the line. The problem is that VMware player doesn't have a tool to allow you to do a disk shrink. So, you would need to have VMware server up and running to be able to shrink the disk of it's grown out of capacity. VMware, or someone else, really needs make some kind of offline disk shrink tool available for all the VMware player users out there.
Another problem is that, up til now, we were not allowed to redistribute the VMware Tools package inside an Appliance, due to licensing issues. VMware has rectified that by fixing their EULA, so hopefully we'll be able to put the VMware tools package into a later release.
Setting the disk size to 50-100GB could also turn out to be a bigger problem, if people are running this in their local computers. We can't know for sure that they have that kind of space available to them.
Increasing the default size limit is a good idea, we just need to make sure we don't go overboard on it's sizing. After all, the max size limit configured in the VM is only used when needed as the system grows.
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Posts: 39
Old thread I know, but has anyone looked at making the picture storage part of the VM a separate file (separate drive)? This would allow the user to use whatever the default is, and if they decided to use the gallery for the long run, they can just swap out the storage drive with any one of the freely available empty VMWare images of any size they wish. Also if in the future they needed to expand the size, they just copy everything to a new bigger virtual disk. P
P.S. Good work on the 1.1 appliance, it rocks! (other than the size)
Posts: 13451
PeterM: That is on my todo list for the next revision.