[Users] Shared Image and Networking Initialization

[Gordan Bobic]

I'm using a shared image cluster (two VMs using the same underlying 
chroot), and this works fine provided both images don't come up at the 
same time, but if they both come up simultaneously, they can both end up 
with the same IP, since the way the networking seems to get initialized 
is by writing the ifcfg-venet files from the host at init time and 
letting the init.d/network handle things as per normal. This causes a 
nasty race condition during startup.

What I would like to do is skip the part that writes the ifcfg-venet* 
files and do my own handling of that (e.g. by symlinking ifcfg-venet* to 
/cluster/[node id]/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-venet*)

Can the writing of ifcfg (and network) files at startup be avoided?

This leads me to a different question - is there an out-of-bound way to 
pass data to a VM without writing to it's disk, e.g. by an environment 
variable? I need a way of passing a unique identifier to a VM that can 
be used in it's startup but without this process of passing a unique 
identifier hitting the VM's disk space (because that would be visible 
from all the VMs sharing that disk space).

Can anybody suggest a way of doing this?

Gordan