Judging interest in virtualization (prebuilt eqemu vm)

[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!

[Kayot]

I know where your going with this idea, but how often would you update it? Every version or every major version? What Database will you use? ^-^ For me, part of the fun was building the server. Other than that, I would prefer to be a GM on someone else

[ndnet]

Ideally, it will be self-updating, on the user's action. It would be nice to make it sort of sustainable, for ease of maintenance and also for the event that I'm not able or interested enough to update it.

Much of the workflow of updating to a new emu version includes repetitive tasks that a script can simplify.

It typically goes something like:
grab latest source (cvs or released source package)
check changelog for sql updates, apply if necessary
rebuild server from source
move new binaries into server folder (or update symlinks to point to new build folder for them)


There might be other approaches to keeping everyone updated, such as through rsync. I do want it to be activated only on the user's preference, however. I'm mulling around other ideas like this updater for streamlining various aspects of getting a temporary server up and going.

Distribution is also a concern. Compressed, this puppy weighs in at just over 1 gig currently so it could use some fat trimming.. it'll still be far too large for me to host, but a torrent should work okay to start with.

I'm not releasing it yet, but this is the changelog I thought to write down as I was making it (okay might have forgotten on some steps, hopefully not~), if anyone wants to follow along:


2/24/07 - Base install of xubuntu, set up eqemu/eqemu account.
- Installed pkg "mysql-server-4.1"
- Really installed 5.0, wtf!
- Installed pkg "libmysqlclient-dev"
- Installed pkg "php5"
- Installed pkg "libio-stringy-perl"
- Installed pkg "samba"
- Made folder structure ~/emusrv/
- Configured smb.conf
- Installed pkg "cvs"
- Installed/configured phpMyAdmin
- Installed pkg "php5-mysql"
- Created eqemu database
- Sourced PEQ database
- Installed pkg "build-essential"
- Commented out project eqemucollector, eqextractor from ./Makefile
- Installed pkg "libperl-dev"
- Commented out utils from ./Makefile
- Get out Maps, Quests, etc linked into the server/ folder
- Edited eqemu_config.xml for this VM's defaults
- Sourced in untold amount of changelog.txt SQL updates
- Set up CVS login and downloaded current source into ~/emuserv/src/cvs
- Source built, fixed bunch of shit to get the emu actually running
- Emu is loaded with PEQ release and table updates to current (LD_LIBRARY_PATH var)
- Tested with Titanium client
- Added some launchers to the panel to start up a world/zone

[herold]

Sounds way cool ... you would have a devoted user right here.

One way to distribute it could be by torrent's ?!? Or would that violate some (for me) unknown law ?

Regards Herold

[sdabbs65]

Originally Posted by herold

Sounds way cool ... you would have a devoted user right here.

One way to distribute it could be by torrent's ?!? Or would that violate some (for me) unknown law ?

Regards Herold

I agree torrents are easy to use and more than one person could seed them making it a very powerfull tool for someting like this.
you just have to be carefull theres a lot of viruis's out there
if your dealing with an exe file or ziped archive.

[ndnet]

Had a chance to read this again. I get busy a lot, and that's a problem with developing something like this. That's also why I'm so interested in creating a manner of allowing it to self-update once you get a particular release to keep current. That's all still in the brainstorming phase, though, but I should have more time to play with this RealSoonNow(tm).

Torrents are awesome for distributing massive, unchanging releases without having to break the bank hosting it somewhere. The idea will be to download a generic base VM, check for updates to the various components that make up the server, maybe do some minimal custom setup (server name, etc) and you'd be ready to roll. Something as close as possible to the ideal of "Retrieve. Run. Ready to roll."

About mention of laws, though, for distributing this. One of the initial steps is going to have to include adding your own spell file to the server directory. That is to my knowledge the only protected content that an EQEMu server needs to run, so everything else should be just fine.

Anywho, can't talk much on this today, will try to get some more polishing-work done on the vm soon and get it to a state where it's easily accessible.