intertwingly

A failure on a five year old, and now rarely used, machine caused me to invest in an inexpensive replacement.  I chose that machine due to the low-wattage requirements, ability to easily add another 4-gig of RAM, and a second hard drive, allowing me to run Ubuntu and virtual machines while leaving the original Vista install intact for the purposes of dual boot.

This set in motion a number of migrations of applications I have written over the years from one machine (and configuration) to another.  And that led me to create VMs ("because I can") to test out new configurations before deploying them in production.  And that lead to me repeatedly trying to get the same configurations on multiple (often virtual) machines.

One such task was trying to get my Rails testing onto a machine which has Hardy Heron LTS on it; which means the test has to work on Ruby 1.8.6; which is what lead me to look into nokogiri.  By looking at the variables one by one (e.g. nokogiri on 1.8.7 before nokogiri on 1.8.6), I could make rapid progress.

The first step in getting a fresh installation ready is to

• install openssh-server so that the machine can be remotely managed
• copy over an .ssh/authorized_keys2 file
• sudo -E visudo and add in the following line temporarily: Defaults:rubys !authenticate.

At this point I can provision the given machine with a set of software and configuration data.  Ultimately, my goal is to be able to clone a hot backup of a live machine with a minimal but essential set of software pre-installed and configured.  And to see if this can be refactored in a way to make use of Capistrano.