xen box
A couple articles I have in the works depend on more than one computer. I took that as a great opportunity to set up Xen. I have an old Shuttle SK-41G that isn't being used for anything, so it was nominated as the host box.
I skipped out of reading any of the actual documentation over at the Xen Homepage and went right to this great tutorial by Julien Danjou. I was surprised at how easy Xen is to set up (or maybe it was Juliens instructions). The longest part was creating the space to be used for the nodes.
As the tutorial explains, I used a stock Sarge install. After successfully creating my first node, I had an idea. Instead of using disk partitions, I chose to use normal files. While this is probably a lot slower than direct disk access, I won't be doing anything too intensive to notice the speed drop. I ended up renaming my original host file to cookie.img and cookie_swap.img. Cookie being for a Cookie Cutter. Now if I want to create a new node, all I have to do is make a copy of cookie, mount it, edit the network settings, and I have an instant Sarge node. How cool is that?
I ended up making four nodes: Jake, Bill, Brett, and Robert. Bonus points to whoever knows where that came from.
The really nice thing about Xen (at least the Debian package) is that it automatically takes care of network bridging -- so once you ptu your node on the network, Xen automatically does all the translating and bridging for you.
Xen is definitely living up to it's hype. I'm going to try to set up a FreeBSD node, but I've heard it's pretty unstable.
