New Laptop

I got a new laptop a few weeks ago. This machine, an HP Pavilion dv8 is radical! Intel i7 quad-core processor with multi-threading shows up as an eight-way box in System Monitor. With Blue Ray DVD, 8 GB of memory and 18.4" screen it still came in under $1400 on eBay. I decided to go with Ubuntu this time instead of OpenSUSE. Ubuntu 10.4 (lucid) is working quite well for me. Everything except the fingerprint reader is working. I even got the TV card (which actually came from my previous HP laptop) working, though only for digital TV broadcasts.

Anyway, my wife got my old laptop (an HP Pavilion with 2GHz Core 2 Duo), freeing up her machine to be the new server in the house. Normally, I do a re-install whenever I upgrade my server, but this time I decided to create virtual servers so the next upgrade won't require a re-install. My wife's old box has an Intel e2200 that doesn't support VTx, so Xen's paravirtualization seemed likely to offer better performance than KVM would.

Installing Xen

My first install attempt was to set up Xen on Ubuntu Server edition. That didn't go very smoothly so I started over with Fedora 13, based on what looked easiest on the Xensource page. The Fedora13Xen4 Tutorial link provides a step by step procedure for installing Xen 4.0.1 on Fedora. The only problem I found was that the tutorial indicated I could install binary dom0 kernel if I didn't want to compile my own kernel using the Tutorial instructions. None of the pre-compiled kernels worked for me, so I went back to compiling the kernel using the instructions in the tutorial.

Getting Xen Bridging Working

The tutorial includes instructions for installing several common Linux distributions. I decided to try the Ubuntu install, but couldn't get a DHCP address. I configured the domU (guest) for bridged networking, but it wasn't getting an address from my existing DHCP server.  If I manually set an address the guest still couldn't get to the outside world. I updated the domU configuration to specify virbr0 as the bridge, but that still didn't work. However, dom0 logs at least showed some DHCPDISCOVER and DHCPOFFER messages:

Sep 30 07:32:34 soprano dnsmasq-dhcp[1362]: DHCPDISCOVER(virbr0) 00:16:36:64:3d:20
Sep 30 07:32:34 soprano dnsmasq-dhcp[1362]: DHCPOFFER(virbr0) 192.168.122.210 00:16:36:64:3d:20
Sep 30 07:32:51 soprano dnsmasq-dhcp[1362]: DHCPDISCOVER(virbr0) 00:16:36:64:3d:20
Sep 30 07:32:51 soprano dnsmasq-dhcp[1362]: DHCPOFFER(virbr0) 192.168.122.210 00:16:36:64:3d:20
Sep 30 07:33:07 soprano dnsmasq-dhcp[1362]: DHCPDISCOVER(virbr0) 00:16:36:64:3d:20
Sep 30 07:33:07 soprano dnsmasq-dhcp[1362]: DHCPOFFER(virbr0) 192.168.122.210 00:16:36:64:3d:20

Little did I know I just needed to specify xenbr0 as the bridge. Now the networking seems to be working fine.