Fedora 16 domUs – Update
Posted by in Xen on November 23, 2011
So, I’ve wiped my test system with the intention of doing a tutorial on installing F16 + Xen. As part of this, I looked into installing a F16 domU with virt-install. When I tried it previously, I ran into this bug, and I ended up having to vnc into the dom0 and use virt-viewer to […]
Fedora 16 dom0 – update
Posted by in Xen on November 23, 2011
I’m trying out F16 as a dom0 from the beginning. No upgrades from F15 this time. So far, it’s generally ok. The install (from the netinstall ISO) was straightforward. Only issue was that F16 strongly recommends that a BIOS boot partition be present. (Read: Requires it unless you pass a nogpt option to the kernel […]
Because this is worth repeating
Posted by in Xen on November 23, 2011
I could have sworn I did this a while ago. But I got the error “‘Out of memory’, “xc_dom_boot_mem_init: can’t allocate low memory for domain\n “” when I tried to do a virt-install today. The problem? I was installing a 64bit domU on a 32bit dom0. Which is a no-no. Didn’t realise until I found […]
Dangers of not thinking about what you’re typing
Just upgraded a domU to Fedora 15 from F14. As part of the upgrade, init essentially dies, and you have to hard reboot the VM. So I thought “Oh hey, why not use the Magic Sysrq keys to trigger a reboot. After all, I just learnt about xm sysrq.” The first command, xm sysrq 0 […]
How I learnt to love xl block-attach
Originally, I exported one block device to each VM, then partitioned it. No fuss, everything self-contained in the one file/logical volume. Then I had a few incidences where the VM crashed, and I needed to get a file or two off the virtual drive. It was a complicated process, as detailed in one of my […]
WSUS on non-domain systems
Posted by in Sysadmin on November 4, 2011
One issue with my shiny new WSUS toy that I did find was that, in theory, only Windows editions with access to Group Policy (namely, those editions labelled Professional and higher) can have the Windows Update server URL set. Of course, in practical use, people have found a way. Whether it’s manually creating registry keys […]
New toy: WSUS
Posted by in Sysadmin on November 4, 2011
So I got WinSrv2008R2 free, courtesy of Dreamspark, and I’ve been messing around with it. I was thinking of creating a few Win7 VMs to mess around with Domains, Group Policy and the like, and one of the things that I found was some functionality called Windows Server Update Services. Turns out WSUS is a […]
Xen 4.1.2 on Fedora 16 Beta – My experience
Posted by in Xen on October 31, 2011
Duplicate of my mail to the Xen-users list:
Stupid Trick: Changing the UUID in /etc/fstab from an emergency shell with screen
Posted by in Linux on October 29, 2011
So. I installed a new VM with /boot formatted as btrfs. Except pygrub apparently doesn’t like btrfs, so it refused to boot. And I refused to reinstall. So it looked like an impasse – I didn’t want to mess around with chroots and installing grub2, but it couldn’t boot without said messing around. And then […]
Revised Fedora virt-install command
Posted by in Xen on October 22, 2011
I got tired of having to muck around with kpartx and such whenever a domU went down. So I decided to just go with 4 LVs per domU – root, home, swap and boot. The command to create the LVs is just one really long one, the original command replicated 4 times: lvcreate -L10G -n […]