Maintenance

This took all day. I first attempted to set the home dir for mholmes on the second disk drive, but when I did that, I ended up with no bash profile. I ended up leaving it at /home/mholmes, but symlinking to specific folders on the second drive instead.

To move VirtualBox vms, I first deleted all snapshots, then moved the disks over (only the disks). Then I created new VMs for the HDs. All working normally, after lots of Windows updates and a bit of tweaking on the Win7 machine (which by default tried to attach the old IDE disk image to a SATA disk controller).

There is now a complete build system for Ubuntu 12.04 set up. Here's how it works.
A machine called papaya is set up with a mirror of the precise repo (main, restricted, security, extras, universe and multiverse), Google's repos for Earth and Chrome, Oracle's Virtualbox and a groovy icon set (Faenza). It also has a reprepro setup that runs a kind-of local ppa with a few home-brew apps for use in the HCMC labs: hcmc-desktop (a metapackage that installs a bunch of necessary software and sets up stuff like printers and so forth), hcmc-auth (for LDAP logins), hcmc-oxygen (xml editor) and hcmc-style (adjusts the candy-cane look to a greyscale look).

In order to manage the mirrors see the setup documention here. The mirror should automatically update itself every day. To add a new repo to be mirrored run the script called add-mirror.sh in the admin user's homedir. It's a wizard-kind-of-thing that leads you by the hand through the process.

In order to add a package to the hcmc repo there is a script in the admin homedir called uprepo.sh. It is extremely basic, adding anything it finds in the admin user's homedir/packages directory to the repo, ignoring anything that is already in the repo. It demands a passphrase (twice) for my gpg key (ask me for it) in order to add a package.

To remove a package from the hcmc repo there is a script called rmpkg.sh in the admin user's homedir. It takes a package name as an argument (e.g. hcmc-desktop) and also demands my gpg passphrase

In order to install a fresh Ubuntu 12.04 you can either do the vanilla install first, then run the Bob the Builder script, or you can grab the hcmc-mini.iso from http://apt.hcmc.uvic.ca/iso/precise/ and put it on a thumb drive using something like unetbootin, which is in the repos. The hcmc-mini.iso is a custom-built iso which has a set of preseeds built in to it so it sets up everything required in the HCMC labs. The great thing about using it is that it pulls all packages for the install directly from papaya, so there is no need to update the machine after the install. After the install you're left with a completely set up HCMC lab machine that's ready to go.
***** NOTE: the admin user that gets set up by hcmc-mini is preseeded with a LAME password because I have so far been unsuccessful in creating an md5 hash to store in the preseed - although it is *supposed* to work. I'll change the preseed if I can get it to work. In the meantime, chage the admin user's password after the build is finished.

The hcmc-mini.iso image is created by a script in the admin user's homedir called build-hcmc-mini.sh. It downloads a stock netboot image from an official Ubuntu source, mangles it to include the necessary preseeds, then repacks it in to a bootable iso image, storing it in /var/www/iso/precise.