Arch Linux

altercation

Member

From: Seattle

Registered: 2011-05-15

Posts: 136

Website

storage-gen - rapid storage configuration tool

storage-gen is a little zsh script that generates storage configuration scripts based on simple template files, specifically for arch pre-install system prep.

https://github.com/altercation/storage-gen

If you get what I'm doing there, and would be interested in using such a script, great. I'd like to get some alpha testers that could contribute two specific things:

1. A template wish list
2. Sample system environments

The system environment is easy. You just run `storage-gen --debug` and send me the resulting debug log. It contains a snapshot of your drive config (run it as root and it captures the start/end partition data, but I understand if running some random script as root is freaky). The more of these I can test against the better.

The system environments are only useful, however, if you have an idea of what you want the script to output. I have some sample templates on the repo that give a good sense of the common configs I'm trying to address.

You can also just run the script with the sample templates on your own system and see what happens. THIS SCRIPT IS NON DESCTRUCTIVE. It just creates an install script (WHICH IS DESTRUCTIVE). So running just storage-gen is safe. Just don't run the output unless you are doing so in a VM or test environment. The output itself is trivial to review and so should be clear enough to spot check first.

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Ethan Schoonover
Precision Colors - http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized

supersymmetry

Member

Registered: 2012-11-02

Posts: 11

Re: storage-gen - rapid storage configuration tool

Hey I just checked out your project, looks like you've put a lot of work in already - kudos. One thing I had, and when I get my xserver on the virtualbox running I'll post an issue in github, was that my template would seem to die at `/usr/local` mountpoint (file system) or (which came next) due to --fstype reiserfs on /var. Dunno yet.

But for the rest looks nice and I like that you pull in massive stats from a lot of places to feed script intelligent operations which are from a security standpoint good in terms of the practice not to persist any changes by script and offer a multitude of moments where you can interact/edit the script. As a Clojure coder I can appreciate a whole lot of code generation and a lot less of the automation.

For one, I found the templates not to suit my preference to split up every sane FHS partition (a little bit paranoid, using VM already and other things but I like a granular fstab etc). So what I tend to do is:

~ 40G vbox disk (SSD preferably)

1 bios_boot +2M ef02 (for grub2-install)
2 swap RAM*2 8200 (beginning of disk for faster spin access although for SSD this shouldn't matter too much, its leftover practice)
3 boot 200M 8300 ext2 (could be a bit more perhaps 400M tops when I had 3 kernels initramfs and still had enough space)
4 root 3G 8300 ext4 (could be a bit less since all that is left are /root and /etc /mnt having /bin and /sbin symlinked now)
5 usr 10G 8300 ext4 (should be perhaps a bit more but since we also have /usr/local)
6 usrlocal 5G ext4 (though nowadays practice seems to be bulld under ~/build rather than /usr/local/source)
7 var 13G ext (oops forgot this one, oh well went with a simple-setup now anyway - I use reiserfs for faster access).
7 opt 4G ext4 (should be a bit more I guess but stuck with my 40G now and too lame to reinit a new vdi)
8 srv 5G ext4 (really depends but mostly I either link /media/srv or something or have like minimal development setup hosting services required)
9 home max ext4

And perhaps a 10 tmp 1G if I have any space space left either to use as a jail or additional when I do not want to spend tmpfs I'd use this perhaps for /var/tmp

Finally, as mentioned, the fstab file reflects a lot of these choices, especially since I like to tune a bit if possible for performance, `noatime` and security `noexec, nodev, nosuid` etc are really extremely important things for me which seem to fall into the domain/scope of your project (though I haven't checked out what it generates on that front yet, I didnt notice any of those switched available yet so maybe nice to add sometime if you like).

Cheers, keep up the good work