I’m getting ready to roll out Crossroads‘ new website and one of the last things on my list was to make a mirror of our content management system (which is on a different system than the public facing server) so that if the production one goes down I can easily switch over to the backup.

I was beginning to look into doing a duplicate installation of Bricolage on my desktop machine at home (which is actually beefier than the server),  but because of the fact that I’m running different releases of Ubuntu, it would have been somewhat difficult.

Enter VirtualBox. I considered Qemu and VMware as well. VMware, while cool, isn’t open source, so was lower down my list. Many reviewers seem to like the ease of VirtualBox and ease was what I was looking for so I thought I’d give it a whirl.

After a little reading I came up with this single line to extract the live image from the disk, move it to my desktop machine, and convert it to a 20G VirtualBox image:

sudo dd if=/dev/hda | ssh brian@10.0.0.100 vboxmanage convertdd stdin bric.vdi 21474836480

A while later…

I run virtualbox and create a machine, specifying my bric.vdi as the primary master disk. It boots up and I have a backup server I can run if I need one.

Getting networking going was a bit more involved. I had to follow the directions in the manual for creating a network bridge and such, but the instructions are very clear and work.

Initially I used the version of VirtualBox in the Ubuntu repositories, but I couldn’t get that one to work with the host based networking and bridging. I installed the version from VirtualBox’s site and it works great.

Stay tuned for a series on the hows and whys of how we developed our new site…