PUBLIC MARKS from lecyborg with tags linux & xen

Howto run smoothwall on Xen.

There is a great howto about installing Xen on Debian Unstable. It is really easy to do and it runs fine. Nevertheless, on production servers, that's not an optimal solution. Debian Unstable has too many updates and things change too often. On production machines, a Xen host system should be stable, secure and should not need much attention. That is where Sarge comes in. If you pull the Xen packages from backports and install them on Debian stable you've got the best of both worlds. Let's do so!

Lastly on one of the domU's, I had recently upgraded it to Etch. It was rebooted previously and did work. However after going back to Xen with Backports, its network didnt work.

Since several years, I build my own network at home, running 2 to 7 machines at the same time (gateway, firewall, workstation, devstation, servers...). In my flat, it produce a lot of noise, take too many space and consume electricty. I decided to stop that, and to run my all network into a single machine, using virtual machine. The technology that convinced me is Xen.

Creating a Virtual Server - domU There are 3 options of what to run DomU on: 1. File Based Image 2. LVM Based 3. Physical Partition 1. A file based image is the quickest to setup, however has poor/terrible IO performance. The virtual server is limited to the initial size of the image created also. The file based Image can however be easily mounted in a rescue system, and easily backed-up. 2. LVM for domU is the industry standard. After the initial setup of LVM, as described here, it is a dream to manage. LVM partitions can be resized afterwards!!! Due to this "resizing" capability and flexibility, its use for Xen Virtual Servers is ideal. They also have much better IO performance than file-based. I dont know about mounting these partitions however in a rescue system. Something to try out... -). 3. Physical Partitions have the best IO, but are difficult to alter and inflexible.

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen on an Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (Ubuntu 7.04) server system (i386). You can find all the software used here in the Ubuntu repositories, so no external files or compilation are needed.