[rjones at redhat.com: Re: Suggestions on building VM disks from scratch]

[Dale Amon]

Here's another nasty bug and some pointers from the developers
to how to fix it.

----- Forwarded message from "Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones at redhat.com> -----

Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2012 20:16:06 +0100
From: "Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones at redhat.com>
To: Dale Amon <amon at vnl.com>
Cc: libvirt-users at redhat.com, eblake at redhat.com, libguestfs at redhat.com
Subject: Re: Suggestions on building VM disks from scratch
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15)

On Thu, Apr 05, 2012 at 08:10:59PM +0100, Dale Amon wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 04, 2012 at 09:09:03PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > Unfortunately we found out today that Ubuntu 12.04's libguestfs
> > package is largely broken.  For more information, see:
> > 
> > https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2012-April/msg00028.html
> > 
> > There is no solution to the kernel bug that affects Ubuntu (only).
> 
> Is this what you are talking about?
> --------------------------------
> 
> root at kdev:/KdevArchive1/vmpool1# guestfish 
> 
> Welcome to guestfish, the libguestfs filesystem interactive shell for
> editing virtual machine filesystems.
> 
> Type: 'help' for help on commands
>       'man' to read the manual
>       'quit' to quit the shell
> 
> ><fs> sparse /KdevArchive1/vmpool1/Mourne.sda 30G
> ><fs> run
> warning: Unable to get device geometry for /var/tmp/guestfs.7NJVau/root
> febootstrap-supermin-helper: ext2: parent directory not found: /lib: File not found by ext2_lookup
> libguestfs: error: external command failed, see earlier error messages

No, this is because febootstrap in Ubuntu 12.04 is broken, which
prevents creation of the appliance.  You have to build febootstrap (at
least 3.14) by hand, install it, and then rebuild the appliance by
hand (update-guestfs-appliance).  This is explained in this email:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2012-April/msg00028.html

We have no Ubuntu maintainer, so Ubuntu just pull in the Debian
packages which they don't test and they don't work well.