Fun with SSH

So I'm working on making new Xen Servers. The hard way. The p2v software from the vendor is not working. The vendor isn't responding to calls. We bought 45 trouble incidents but they are saying we don't have that ability.

So to work around that, I'm making something of a "gold-standard" image. Not exactly, but close enough. Its an image of a system that we know works, and I have to go in and make some minor changes to it at boot time.

Then I log into the original server, and copy the data over to the virtual one. I'm doing that via TAR over SSH. Last night, it was a pain. I would typo the password and then wait for ever for it to time out. Tonight, on the second system (the first one was only a handful of copies) and since I a lot of directories to copy, I made an ssh key. It was a bit of a pain to get it set up right... but WOW!!!!

Makes life so much easier.

I also set up a new way to connect to my box at home. It's a little faster. I used to set it up as: SSH to box, start vnc server, start client on same box, export x11 display back to desktop at work. It was slow. I set up vnc over SSH so I ssh into the box, start the server, and then use VNC from my Desktop. Way faster.