iPhone: defective by design

El iPhone de Apple sólo puede ser usado con AT&T ... misma sh*t con distinto --muy estético y acabado-- olor, link .
El DRM apesta ... por más bonito que se vea :-P

Migrating XEN installation from fc5 to centos5

Scenario

• Deployment: several XEN guests running Debian 3.1 (Sarge) over a Fedora Core 5 (fc5) host. Host & guests installed with distro-provided packages.
  
• Goal: migrate host from fc5 to centos5 (held migration until centos5 got released)
  
• Difficulty: a lot. :-S
  

UPDATE 11-Jun-2007: See 2.c: /dev/xvc0 instead of /dev/console in guest
UPDATE 13-Jun-2007: See 2.d: oneliner for easy fixed guest MAC generation

Migration

It was faaaaar... more complex than we originally thought.

1. XEN host stuff

1.a. Just one kernel-xen package

FC5 came with two kernel-xen flavor: kernel-xen0 for the Dom0 guest and kernel-xenU for the other unprivileged guests.
Centos5 (and FC6) comes with just one kernel-xen package, this is quite annoying at first (this "mix" of true hardware drivers and virt. guest ones), but it starts to make sense once you ride the wave :)
You can see it with ("front" ones are for the guests , "back" for the host):

host# rpm -ql kernel-xen | egrep /xen

1.b. XEN guest kernel doesn't have the virtual block driver

That is: the guest will plainly PANIC if used without an initrd, so now you do have to make an explicit initrd.guest.img (whatever name you'd like) and add a ramdisk= option to the xen guest config file.
That is:

host# mkinitrd --preload=xenblk --preload=xennet -f -v /boot/initrd-2.6.18-8.1.4.el5xen.guest.img 2.6.18-8.1.4.el5xen
host# vim /etc/xen/xm-guest1 ### add: ramdisk=/boot/initrd.guest.img ### see below
host# restorecon -v /boot/initrd*

The last line (restorecon ... ) is needed because xend is _correctly_ running confined by "targeted" SELinux, and mkinitrd doesn't relabel the initrd file under /boot to allow xend access.
BTW, we prefer to have a "visible" and stable guest file configuration, so we did

host# cd /boot
host# ln -sf initrd-2.6.18-8.1.4.el5xen.guest.img initrd-guest.img
host# ln -sf vmlinuz-2.6.18-8.1.4.el5xen vmlinuz-guest

1.c. [UPDATE] that nasty "4gb seg fixup, process ..." (@host)

From XenFAQ and elsewhere:

host# echo 'hwcap 0 nosegneg' > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/libc6-xen.conf

host# ldconfig -v

2. XEN guest stuff

2.a. udevd inside guests

Debian 3.1 Sarge is installed on our guest images.
Now with Centos5 XEN we do need udevd running inside guests (to correctly setup /dev), that is:

guest# apt-get install udev ### installs udev and hotplug packages

2.b. the return of the "4gb seg fixup" (guest)

That comes from the way Xen uses the CPU segmentation; for newer distros it may be solved with echo 'hwcap 0 nosegneg' > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/libc6-xen.conf , but Debian 3.1 doesn't come with this feature, so we had to:

guest# mv /lib/tls /lib/tls.DISABLED

"Offline'ing" TLS glibc implementation solved the problem, beware that you'll need to redo this everytime libc6 package is upgraded (trivially solved by a rcS script).

2.c. getty /dev/tty1 -> getty /dev/xvc0

UPDATE: /dev/console _seemed_ to work, but it lacked tty' normal signal handling such as Ctrl-C (?), putting /dev/xvc0 solved the problem.

For whatever reason (?), /dev/tty1 was working nicely as Xen guest console (xm console ), but now you should use /dev/xvc0.
That is:

guest# vim /etc/inittab ### check that following line is present:

x0:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 xvc0

guest# echo xvc0 >> /etc/securetty

2.d. [UPDATE] Debian 4.0 and network device naming

After upgrading guests from Debian 3.1 (Sarge) to 4.0 (Etch) a "nice touch" appeared: AFAICS Debian udev infrastructure tries to keep netdev naming "constant" based on device's MAC address (no, thanks |-[ ).
Given that Xen generates a non-constant MAC address each time it boots a guest, this makes each Debian 4.0 guest boot to have an increasing ethN device.

Two possible solutions:

1. Fix MAC address in Xen guest vm config, you could use the following oneliner that uses the first 6 hexdigits from the md5 over the (unique) guestname. This 6 hexdigits are appended to the XenSource reserved MAC prefix 00:16:3E .
   
   guest# echo -n guestname.FQDN | md5sum | sed -r 's/(..)(..)(..).*/00:16:3E:\1:\2:\3/'
   
   ... or ...
   
2. Just disable the correspondent udev rules by renaming:
   
   guest# mv /etc/udev/rules.d/{,.}z25_persistent-net.rules

... pheeuuu ... 'nuff written.

Por fin entendí porqué SVN siempre apestó para mí.

... entonces ya puedo redimir mi pecado de no haber aprendido nunca SVN habiendo escapado directamente de CVS a GIT ;-)

Linux Torvalds no sólo habla sobre GIT, sino también sobre conceptos de SCM distribuídos & alike.
Imperdible.