In my last post, I was back to the drawing board on moving mail from pal to posty, due to a discrepancy in the Maildir between courier IMAP and dovecot IMAP. My solution then was to install courier IMAP on posty and try again. To make a long story short, that didn't work. The folders were now present in the email webclient, but the receive times were all exactly the same. I could have said, good enough, but I had no clue why the receive times were all the same, and I had a sneaky suspicion that there may be other issues lurking. So once again, back to the drawing board.
My next idea was to try something that I've been wanting to try regardless, that is to take a physical machine and virtualize it. So I did a little research on exactly how it could be done. Along the way I also discovered a blunder I had made last week, when I set up all my servers to run ntp, the network time daemon that periodically check the time from some network time server and adjusts the computers clock. It's obvious to me now, that virtual machines should not have ntp running, as they all will be trying to adjust the same clock, only the host OS should run ntp. So I removed ntp for on all the virtual servers.
On to virtualizing a physical machine. The idea is to boot a live cd on the computer to be virtualized. Then make an image of the entire hard drive, and transfer it to the host OS. I found some instructions that were in German here, and used Google translation to get the gist of it. The instructions needed some interpretation, but the basic process is to use the 'dd' command piped through gzip, and sent to netcat to make a compressed image and transfer it across the network. The commands presented on the page didn't work exactly, so I had to search through some man pages to find the exact syntax.
It took about 3 hours to transfer the image from pal to phantom, and another 2 hours to make a backup copy before I tried to install it as a virtual machine. When that was finally done I did some more research on exactly how to start a live image as a virtual machine. The German instructions used a -snapshot option for virt-install, but my virt-install didn't. Looking through the virt-install man page, I found the --import option that booted from a live image rather than try to perform an install. I ran that and it appeared to work, but I could not ping the virtual pal. Unfortunetly the only computer that is setup to view a virutal console is real pal, and I didn't like the idea of both pals running at the same time on the same network, as servy might direct any mail that's queued up to either.
Eventually I guessed that virtual pal wasn't responding so it safe to start up real pal and use the virtual manager to view the console. Viewing the console, I could see that it was running, and a prompt was up saying the display parameters had changed, and asking what to do about it. After reseting the default video parameters, I had virtual pal running in a window from real pal, which was mildly mind-boggling. I discovered that virtual pal for one reason or another was assigned a dynamic IP address rather than getting a real one. Perhaps it wasn't going through the bridged network that was set up on phantom, or perhaps network manager had somehow screwed up (it has done that in the past and overridden the values in /etc/network/interfaces). Either way, by now real pal had been spooled all the email servy had been saving up for him, so the image on phantom was out of date. I would have to repeat this several hour process next weekend. But at least I know it works, and the basic process to use.
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