Enhancements

64 bits kernels

The utilities have been tested on opteron processors (64 bits). You can use the 64 bits or 32 bits version of the tools on a 64 bit kernel without problem.

chcontext command

Add support for the following flags (S_FLAGS in the configuration file) mount: hide /proc/mounts netif: hide network devices

Creating vservers using Fedora core 3 first CD

The newvserver command now support Fedora Core 3 first CD to create a vserver. It also works for 64bits (x86_64) fedora core 3.

Kernel 2.6 support

The utilities now work on 2.4 and 2.6 kernels.

New utility vserver-list

This scripts prints the list of vservers. This list is simple and usable in for loop (using back quote for example). You can get the list of running, not running, or all vservers.

New vserver commands

We have prototyped a new concept for some time now and vserver 0.40 is showing the first details of this technology. This is called "synthetic vservers" and may very well become a major shift in the way we manage projects and servers.

I am preparing a full presentation of this. For now, this is just to explain why the vserver command as the new sub-commands "assemble" and "remove".

A synthetic vserver is a vserver created out of another vserver but merging together resource file (packages), data and configurations. Once a vserver is assembled, you may use it as usual. Once you are done with it, you can remove it.

The interest of this strategy is that you usually end up with many vservers for different project, but all based on the same package set. They are often cloned from the same reference vserver. As the number of vserver grows, you end up with more and more admin tasks duplicated among all those vservers.

With synthetic vserver, you always have a clear separation from the admin tasks touching to reference vservers and configuration tasks associated with specific projects.

Anyway, as I said before, a full paper will be written shortly. To conclude, a synthetic vserver reduces the amount of admiin tasks needed and at the same time, provides an exact description of of project.

Using DHCP on vservers

A vserver may act as a DHCP client now. This is useful when you move vservers around (or transport them on your notebook) and wish to operate on the network without having to obtain a fixed IP address.

To enable this, just enter

	IPROOT=dhcp

in the configuration file. Note that this also works even if the root server (the workstation or notebook) is also using DHCP to get an IP address. If this is the case, you must edit the file /etc/dhclient.conf (generally missing) and place the following line.

	send dhcp-client-identifier "root server";

This allows the DHCP server to tell apart the requests coming from vservers from the requests coming from the root server, since they are all sharing the same MAC address.

Bug fixes

Command newvserver

It was not possible to clone the root server to create a vserver using this command. Now it works. It is not the best way to create a vserver since it is inheriting all the stuff you have configured/added to your root server, but it is an easy way to get started with vservers.