Having a go at LinuxMCE on xen

[daballiemo]

My thought:

As I have a number of website running of Xen, sharing SMB to local PC's and being fed up with Vista not coming out of hibernate I was willing to give a DomU construction a go. So let me tell you about that in this thread. First of all my xen-tools script statement:

xen-create-image --hostname=mediaserver --size=25Gb --swap=4Gb --ide \
--ip=10.0.0.11 --netmask=255.255.255.0 --gateway=10.0.0.138 --force \
--dir=/virtualmachines --memory=1024Mb --arch=amd64 --kernel=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-19-xen \
--initrd=/boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-19-xen --install-method=debootstrap --dist=gutsy \
--mirror=http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ --passwd

[daballiemo]

1) Then, to make sure everything is as virgin as possible, get rid of update line in sources.list. I use vim (apt-get install vim) to edit /etc/apt/sources.list to comment out all of the update depositories.
2) Install the kubuntu desktop via apt-get install kubuntu-desktop. Btw this will take a bit of time ;-)
3) After the installation I will start a new X session on my desktop (my server is headless) with "xinit -- :1 vt12. After that switch to vt 12 and kick of a X session through ssh by "ssh -X -l root 10.0.0.11.
4) Did i tell already I exported an extra PCI network card to the DomU via PCIBack? No i didn't but that is a whole story on its self. If you have done this as well make sure that the card is inserted via the PCI statement in the xen config. Need any details, let me know.
5) So now you should have a running virgin kubuntu enviroment with 2 network cards, should be the perfect enviroment for LinuxMCE ;-)
6) using smb/nfs make sure you put the 2 linuxmce cd's and the kubuntu desktop cd on your virtual system.
7) Install cron & iptables: "apt-get install cron iptables". You will need it later on, that is LinuxMCE.

[daballiemo]

Now comes the tricky part, for whatever reason you are able to mount the first iso and get the installation file of there but running it will not give you a go, at least that is you get no desktop item. So u can't kick of the installation. Furthermore running it will complain not being to unzip a compressed image.

So i did it the following way: because the installer consists out of a script and a compressed image I used vim to take the script part out and save it in a new file. I used one of the standard tools to unzip the compressed image. For my script and the other necessary files see the download link.

http://www.gigasize.com/get.php?d=msb28nkr1wb

unpack into mceinstaller dir in root, cd to the directory and execute han.sh "./han.sh"

[daballiemo]

Then the next problem. As i am using X over ssh i have to do something about the display variable when starting of LinuxMCE. First of all I kill the running process for lmce*

ps -ef | grep lmce

it gives you the pid number, kill that one of.

now edit /usr/pluto/bin/lmce

[daballiemo]

And that is where it all stopped. To much freakin hassle. Won't finish this, or my family life will be dead and gone for sure. But I've entered another road, so bear with me and I'll tell....

[daballiemo]

Yes, yes and yes again. Got it working after almost a year of tries and more tries...

Configuration:
server hardware: ASUS M3A Mb, AMD 64*2 5000+ 4Gb memory and a couple of HD's, an extra network card and one Hauppauge PVR150
server software: Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 server with XEN 3.2 installed

xen setup according to http://docwhat.gerf.org/2008/08/xen-networking/. Make sure you name the bridges eth0, eth1 etc otherwise the setup will fail.

Dom0 has a pciback.hide statement in the kernel parameters to hide the capture card. I've installed ConVirt to make my life easy when making VM's. Dont forget to change the "file" statement into "tap:aio" otherwise starting the vm will fail. Make also sure to run the ConVirt script on the server otherwise you are not able to connect....

DomU (LinuxMCE) created as a PVM. Any other option results in the disasters I have had during the last year. Attach one virtual network card to bridge eth0 the other to bridge eth1 after setting up. When starting the install LinuxMCE will detect 2 networkcards for the normal setup.

DomU (Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon with Myth backend installed). Use ConVirt to bootstrap a Gutsy commandline system. Make sure you add the hauppauge card to the config file through the pci statement. Also do not forget to add "extra="swiotbl=force"" otherwise your Domu will crash on DMA errors. Add Mythbacked to the DomU as described in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MythTV/Install/Feisty/Backend, make sure you do not make a master but a slave. Via the setup connect to the master. And you are up and running ;-) Make sure you do not use any version newer than Gutsy or otherwise you probably have to rebuild the core because of a corrupted Mythconverge database.

If you want to know all the info I gathered during the process just PM me and I'll send you my details for delicious.com. I am happy to answer any question or send any config file ;-)

Next topic: how to get my ISDN card into place, netbooting XEN MD ?

[tschak909]

Could you please document that on the wiki, once we've brought it back up?

-Thom

[daballiemo]

Thom,

Will do, but will take a bit of time. I'm currently on holiday, back the 8th of October. Its in my own interest to document it as well :-)

rgds

Han

[daballiemo]

We'll gents, all failed. The problem lies in the fact that XEN virtual network interfaces will not pass enough traffic to have the system run smooth. Maybe VT_D will help but for that I'll first have to buy a new MB.

rgds

[totallymaxed]

We'll gents, all failed. The problem lies in the fact that XEN virtual network interfaces will not pass enough traffic to have the system run smooth. Maybe VT_D will help but for that I'll first have to buy a new MB.

rgds

Try Virtualbox (http://www.virtualbox.org) ... that works fine with the LinuxMCE-0710 DVD ISO. Cant see why the CD iso would not work too... but I have not tried those.

Andrew

[grantmasterflash]

We'll gents, all failed. The problem lies in the fact that XEN virtual network interfaces will not pass enough traffic to have the system run smooth. Maybe VT_D will help but for that I'll first have to buy a new MB.

rgds

I hate to say this but if VirtualBox can do this then Xen can. I get over double the network bandwidth out of Xen as I do VirtualBox and I use both for various projects. There's obviously something misconfigured with Xen. I'll see if I can duplicate this as I've been wanting to do it.

Grant McWilliams

[hari]

don't use hvm.

best regards,
Hari

[daballiemo]

Hari,

I had to use HVM as the other way, ie use PV, would not let me start the installer. Only after extracting the gz part of the installer and modifying the script in front of the gz container I was able to run the installer. But, when the system was running I got all kind of errors crashes etc. That is why I went for the core to be HVM and a mythbuntu slavebackend to do my TV recordings.

At this moment it will only be possible to build a HVM and have the access to PCI(e) directly using VT-d which is only available on the P5E VM DO mb which I do not have. Beside that its running out as well but I am still trying to find one. (http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/VTdHowTo)

The whole XEN setup will give me the ability to be able to run my websites on the external side of the server without interfering with LCME.

I would love to have a way to set it up as a PV which takes a way the need for a new motherboard as I can pciback the necessary cards into the VM.

rgds

Han

[hari]

run the installer on hvm/kvm/real hardware/wherever, then convert/extract the root partition out of the (virtual) disk (image).

br hari

[daballiemo]

Hari,

thanks for your thoughts, although the latter part I really have no clue how to go about. Can you give me a hint, I am very interested ;-)