[ndnet]

I'll start with an admission: I really like virtualization, I love the idea of sandboxes/isolation for clean development and testing. Thus, from my perspective a VM with a preinstalled EQEmu server is only a natural direction.

Now, another admission, I hate duplicated effort. I know that I've turned up a few mentions of VMWare and talk of virtual machines searching the forums, but I don't see anyone distributing such a beast. I would like to know if I just have not found it yet (and a link would be much appreciated) or if there's just no publically available option for it.

Why do I ask, though? I don't want to reinstall apache/php/perl/etc development tools on my windows installation and I don't switch to my linux installation often thanks to Vanguard (maybe cedega will catch up.. heh). I am in the process of building up a machine in vmware from scratch so that I can back it up to dvd as a clean slate, then use it for screwing around with every aspect of the EQEmu project: code changes, database admin, webserver usage, etc. My client will still be running on my base windows installation, of course, as EQ (or SC!~) in a VM wouldn't be very enjoyable.

I would like to solicit input from the community about this undertaking, though, as again I hate duplicating effort and would love to hear about your approaches to the problem from people who've built them or have given them consideration. Configuration options, Linux distribution to use, window manager, default drive size, memory allocation, default services settings, everything.


I'll start off discussion on the OS choices and some services that can be running:

Obviously it will be based on Linux, we could never distribute anything that had Windows preinstalled. I am currently building my VM with xubuntu, a Ubuntu flavor with Xfce as its window manager, more lightweight than KDE or Gnome. Also it would not come with the eqstrings and spells file as that could be considered copyrighted material of Sony and would also prohibit distribution. Is there anything else that the user would have to supply for their server? Config files, etc, can be left at some default I would think, but included with the server.

I think it would be nice having network shares via Samba set up on the server's root folder to allow for easy access to things like config files. An FTP server might also be useful, or a LogMeIn/Hamachi installer for secure, remote access to SMB shares.

A web server would be useful (to me, anyway, and is usually included in distributions anyway), but whether it's Apache2 or something smaller like Lighttpd is something to consider.

MySQL is a must, probably 4.1 -- 5.0 could be considered as well since it should worky fine. Development headers of course need to be there for server compilation, too. Perl, as well, sits in this category.

That's all I'll say for now on this, though. I have more ideas for this sort of project, but I'd like to get a discussion going without narrowing the scope too much and see how others feel about it.

Looking forward to input!