virsh – show ip address of all running VMs

If you are using the libvirt and associated tools, then you must be aware about virt-manager. However this being a GUI tools, it is not possible to always use this. “virsh” is a good option for this.

To start with, if you need to know all the VMs all the running VMs, then you can use (to only view the names):

virsh list --name

Extending this to make it more useful is the case if you need to know the IP address for the running VMs. Here is a simple code that you can put in alias or function that can be used to get the IP address of the running VM’s.

dnsmasq local name resolution with NetworkManager

Network Manager suports starting dnsmasq which helps you have a local cache for DNS thus getting faster resolution for the DNS queries.

Dnsmasq with netowrkmanager

So, one thing that I have been thinking about is having a local name resolution for the VMs. So, I wanted something like this to work:

vm1 => 172.17.42,1

vm2 => 172.17.42,2

and so on …

To achieve this and reverse dns to work, we will add the entries in file “/etc/NetworkManager/dnsmasq.d/hostnames“. Just one more problem, adding so many entries manually? So, to help you with that, I created this small script:

docker search description truncated

When you search with “docker search”, you would notice that the description of the image is truncated. Sometimes you want to see full description, to do so, you can use –no-trunc option. So, for example you want to search for fedora images, you can use the following command:

docker search --no-trunc  fedora

apache in docker to serve local website

I have some backup’s of website on my laptop, which I occasionally want to view. Now, I could have setup apache to serve them directly with VirtualHost or alias but wanted a better solution. So, docker comes to rescue.

First, I installed fedora-dockerfiles and then made some modifications, here they are :

sudo yum install fedora-dockerfiles

After this is done, go to /usr/share/fedora-dockerfiles/apache and make some modification to Dockerfile.  After the modifications, the file looks like this

qemu manager for Windows to run your linux distribution

If you are into virtualization, then you must have heard about Qemu. And if you are on windows then this is a must:

http://www.davereyn.co.uk/download.htm

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Try a live Distro without burning on CD or running in VM

I keep trying a lot of distributions and mostly I try them once and get the configurations and put them on my box :), this works best for me so that I dont have to keep re-configuring my system again and again. So, burning the disc for one time use is overhead and wastes a lot of time for me.

Why burn a disc when GRUB is there to help. So today we will try to use the installed grub run a extracted iso image. Lets go step by step:

Access the disk image created by Qemu using guestfish in Fedora.

If you are used to using Qemu for doing some experiments with different distro’s then you would also understand the problem of having to do ftp/ssh to copy the files from virtual machine to local machine. Also you have to run the machine to do that. How would you like to have a application that can help you copy the files to and from the  image without having to run the VM. That’s exactly what the guestfish does. How to do it, quick demo here: