[xen-tools-discuss] Issue with standalone Debian apt repo

[John Oliver]

Background: I'm historically a Red Hat guy, but kind of have to use
Debian in this case.  I'm brand-new to Xen.  The host I'm working on has
no Internet access, and cannot have Internet access under any
circumstance.  So, after installing Debian 8 "Jessie", I fiddled around
until I got a local apt repo working.  I can 'apt-get install foo' no
problem.  But xen-tools is always finding something to complain about.

First, I kept getting "Couldn't find a useful entry in the sources.list
files of the Dom0. Tried: /etc/apt/sources.list"  It appears that was
coming from xt-guess-suite-and-mirror  My first question / observation
would be, if apt is happy with my repo, why isn't
xt-guess-suite-and-mirror?

I got past that issue by replacing mirror= and dist= with hard-coded
lines.  Then it complained about not seeing the Release file.  So I had
to figure out how to create that.  Again... if apt works just fine
without it, why is xen-tools so picky?  Same thing with Release.gpg, and
I'm working through a stumbling block getting apt to trust the
certificate I used to sign Release.  Once I have that, though, will
xen-tools finally be happy, or will it complain more?

I'd really like to see an option to the relevant parts of xen-tools to
ignore the "unnecessary" overhead.  I am a long way from being against
properly signing things, etc.  But this is on a closed network, and I
could be done with my mission to stand up a Xen server and could "make
it right" at my leisure.  As bad as an idea as it might be, how do I
just move ahead without making everything perfect, especially when apt
works perfectly well?

Thanks...

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* John Oliver                             http://www.john-oliver.net/ *
*                                                                     *
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