Just over a fortnight ago I broke a toe (digitus pedis II) on my left foot. I recommend you don’t do that: it’s rather painful and, besides having to hop along, I’ve had to resort to renting cars with automatic transmission to avoid having to painfully press a clutch.

Anyway, I decided I’d forgo going on holiday, spending the time at home doing a bit of Spring Summer cleaning (even if the weather here gives the impression it’s Autumn). One of the tasks I’ve set myself is to clean up my testing environment.

I recently purchased a nice little “server”, an HP ProLiant N40L to replace some of the ancient equipment I’ve been using (or not using) for the last six years or so. I added 8GB of RAM, and I’m happily enjoying KVM on CentOS with an NFS pool on my venerable NV+. No more VMWare Server for me. (Does that product even still exist?)

Things I’ve done so far include

• Automate machine (domain) setup with virt-install, which creates the domain and sets up the corresponding volumes.
• Set up nginx to dole out Kickstart (respectively AutoYast) scripts to launch installs.

The rest of the weekend I’ll probably be spending doing some work with Ansible, because I need that for a project I’ll be working on next week. (After renting a car with automatic transmission to get me there! :-)