18 May 2006

Xen

Ive been testing out Xen. Or rather Im TRYING to test out Xen on a R&D server.
Since I have a preference for the Fedora Core project, I assumed that using the FC5 distro would be a great way to test out the new stuff. So I installed it on the server without much problem. I then updated everything using yum and installed the latest xen kernels.

Changed the grub entry to bootup xen, and rebooted.

Everything was fine, and seemed ok until I ran "xm list" which should show the status of the xen server.
But all I got was a silly error message stating:
Error connecting to xend: No such file or directory. Is xend running?


Checked the logs, checked the setup files, checked everything, with no success in getting xen up and running.

Then I found this via google (after about 50 searches):

http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-users/2006-05/msg00209.html

this is a well know bug, see

https://bugzill.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=191037

Matthias


Great. So the bug entry states that "kernel 2.6.16-1.2111_FC5xen0 breaks xend"
Either download a new 2111 from davej
... using a newer kernel from davej helped. For details, add http://people.redhat.com/davej/kernels/Fedora/FC5/kernels.repo to /etc/yum.repos.d/ and update.

or downgrading to xen-2096. I did the latter using rpmseek.com.

[Of course when you rpm it to install, it will complain that there is a newer version installed blah blah blah, so I had to --force it.)

Updated the grub file and rebooted, and voila, xm list works.

Then I found that the xenguest-install.py script wouldnt install CentOS4.3 even though I provided NFS, and FTP to the base tree. It just gave an infuriating error of: Invalid NFS location give.

Again after the 51st google search, I found out that the darn script was only for FC5 guest installs! Why didnt they say so in the first place?

So I was not impressed, and it looks like id have to create the guest by hand.
To the fedora team:
1) fix the builds of xen so it doesnt break
2) Make it clear that the script is only for FC

[Because Im lazy, Im downloading the CentOS4.3 image from jailtime.org. Its just a 94MB download, but its so slow! another 3 hours to go....]

yk.