[gentoo-user] Comparing guest OS filesystems

[gentoo-user] Comparing guest OS filesystems

[Adam Carter]

Hi All. I'm looking for some suggestions. Setup is Gentoo host running
VMWare workstation 8 with two guests which are loosely based on RHEL.
I'm checking to see if patch installation order in the guests has any
effect. Not all the patches are rpm based, so I want to check to see
if there are any differences in the file content between the guests.

This (find / -type f -exec md5sum {} + > /sumoutput.txt) hangs after
about 11000 files. I could troubleshoot it, but is there something
more elegant? Something to mount the guest filesystem in gentoo?

Re: [gentoo-user] Comparing guest OS filesystems

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thu, 8 Dec 2011 09:50:55 +1100
Adam Carter <adamcarter3@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi All. I'm looking for some suggestions. Setup is Gentoo host running
> VMWare workstation 8 with two guests which are loosely based on RHEL.
> I'm checking to see if patch installation order in the guests has any
> effect. Not all the patches are rpm based, so I want to check to see
> if there are any differences in the file content between the guests.
> 
> This (find / -type f -exec md5sum {} + > /sumoutput.txt) hangs after
> about 11000 files. I could troubleshoot it, but is there something
> more elegant? Something to mount the guest filesystem in gentoo?
> 

The command you are running is over-reaching. You didn't say which file
the command stops at, but I'll bet it is something in /proc or /sys,
places where you really shouldn't be md5summing anyway.

You are doing an update, the places you should be checking are more
likely /etc, /bin, /sbin, /lib, /opt, /usr and the like.

Rather use find with the -xdev option, and repeat for each on-disk
file-system.

If the host has much more resources than the guest, enough more to make
running md5sum on the host a viable proposition, then the easiest would
be for the guest to export it's filesystem over nfs to the host.

It is possible to loop-mount the guest vmdk file to the host, but a
quick google shows that this can get quite involved. NFS can be set
up and running in a few minutes.  

-- 
Alan McKinnnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com