The other day, I was going through system mail to make sure everything was working (and reporting) properly. A script that I had put in /etc/cron.daily wasn't sending me any mail, which was odd: it ran fine when I started it manually. After a little digging, it turns out that run-parts will ignore some items based on namespace requirements and my script had a .sh suffix. I know it's not a necessary thing to have, but it helps me keep track at a glance what stuff I've put in that directory. So, running run-parts --test /your/directory will tell you what run-parts will actually run. If you want to know more about the namespace requirements, check out the man page for run-parts.

Well, almost. make-live generates the directories, builds the architecture specified, adds the packages I want, but doesn't create an .iso file. http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLive/Howto/ISO says that the script is supposed to, so maybe I'm overlooking something simple. Or just a little too much New Year's cheer :)

I spent a lot of time scratching my head over why the default Xen configuration in etch using network-dummy worked, but network-bridge did not. Following Steve's article on using Xen and Sid, I got everything going -- except networking and a running DomU. Doh.

Today, I fired up the box, had networking on Dom0 working but using the network-dummy script and used xen-tools to install a DomU using debootstrap. When I started the DomU, it failed on the network device. Doh. Set network-bridge in the xen config file, restart xend, and it worked. Right on. So now I have an amd64 etch Dom0 running an amd64 etch DomU.

Watching kernel messages, it seemed that the xen bridge and virtual interfaces are not brought up until a DomU is started. Networking was fine as soon as I had a guest running. Maybe one day I'll know enough to sort it out, but I bet someone beats me to it.

The udev stuff I mentioned before was working correctly, turns out it's something in the xen network-bridge script that isn't. The default of network-dummy works, so I can at least get some testing done. The network-bridge script is failing to copy the settings from eth0 to xenbr0, peth0, vif0.0, and not creating a random MAC address. Turns out someone on the xen-user list is having the exact same problem with Etch and xen, so maybe with a few people working on it an answer will be found soon. Looks like I'll be debugging scripts today.

A few quick notes:
I used Steve's article on http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/396, where everything seemed to work, except uncommenting the network-bridge option. ifconfig shows all of the devices that are needed by the bridge, but no IP addresses and no MAC addresses.

The installation of Etch on the PE2950 was mostly painless. The only trouble is that due to some weird BIOS mapping, the NICs are assigned eth0 and eth1 in reverse order. My udev rule is being overwritten by something, so this morning I'll either have to find where or put my rule last. Everything else has gone well: lvm was set up through the installer, a xen kernel booted without problem, and after the NIC naming issue is sorted, Steve's xen-tools ought to have some guests running in no time.

I have been lurking long enough, it's time to contribute.

This morning, Etch is being installed on a PowerEdge 2950. Hardware RAID 5, LVM, and (hopefully) a xen kernel after the system is up. There is a lot of material out on how to set up each of the above, but I couldn't find anything that walked through how to set up a system from scratch. I'll try to document the process and write up an article on how to do it (if all goes well.)