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While working on some Xen stuff, I’ve found that a drawing is about the easiest way to document some things.

I’m going to be doing some drawings of custom Xen networks, but until then, here are a few drawings of default Xen networks to serve as a point of reference.

This first one just shows how a non-Xen networking setup might look. The white box is just a label. Not much to see :)

Now, we’ll look at what starting xend does to our network. Later on, I’ll try to blog about the scripts that make this change and how they work. If you boot into your Xen kernel in and haven’t done anything with Xen yet, this is what your setup looks like (well, maybe).

If you bring up a guest OS (DomU), this is what your networking will look like. This set-up is suitable for most Xen installs.

More to come…

Update: Changed the X in vifX.Y to match the domain ID. Good eye Lamont.

Here’s my first take on a Xen network that I’m putting together for work.

This all takes place in one physical box with 2 physical network interfaces. I’m still not sure this is path we’ll take, but it’s a start. Also, it might have been less complex if I did routing and NATing in Dom0, but for security reasons, I’ve opted to keep Dom0 very minimal. I’ve even considered leaving it off of the network (console only). Any thoughts/suggestions?

Update: As pointed by a confused (but observant) reader… There is no such thing as fif3.0. It should have been labeled vif3.0. Good eye. Guess I was a little sleepy when working on it :)

I’ve installed what I’m pretty sure will be the final version of FC6 (I checked the SHA1SUMs from a listing at an official mirror). Here are my first impressions:

Mono seems to be totally jacked:

[gabe@office ~]$ tomboy
Segmentation fault

[gabe@office ~]$ mono -V
Segmentation fault

[gabe@office ~]$ mcs
Segmentation fault

[gabe@office ~]$ sqlsharp
Segmentation fault

[gabe@office ~]$ gmcs
Segmentation fault

[gabe@office ~]$ echo “Segmentation fault”
Segmentation fault

O.K. that last one isn’t that disturbing, but the others look pretty messed. I’m guessing they didn’t build it with a “–with-xen_opt=yes” flag. I’m running this box on Xen, but if you don’t, I’m guessing Mono would work just fine. That brings me to my next point…

When installing, it has an option for Xen related tools. I selected them to be installed. I assumed it would install a few userland tools for monitoring and creating Xen instances. I further assumed it would install an additional Xen kernel and add that option to GRUB. To my surprise, it only installed a Xen kernel. This would be the first time that any distro, that I’ve run, has done this out of the box. I’ve stated before that I thought this would eventually be the norm. Please note that this is not the default behavior.

One major plus is that the bubbles are gone. If you used FC5 and have good taste or a sense of style, you know what I’m talking about. The DNA strands are much, much better, but still, they are not great.

The new font (DejaVu) looks pretty good. Hinting is still a little off on some uppercase letters.

I was hoping Firefox 2 RC 3 would have been dropped in. I know, at some point you have to say “no” to new packages.

Evolution seems a little bit snappier. I don’t follow it’s development, so I have no idea what to attribute that to.

There are still 101 services that startup when you boot. Shutting half of them down is still the first thing I do after I install.

Clearlooks has nice controls but the icons and the window borders look average. I see icons from old GNOME, RH9, old Blue Curve, Tango, etc…

That’s the short list. Overall, I like it better then FC5 so far. I still think Ubuntu has done a better job pulling it all together, however I’m using FC because of it’s solid Xen support.

I’ll add to this list if anything interesting shows up in the next few days.

The humble server that I use to host a few (11) web sites is getting updated. It’s not going to be that big of a deal (99% idle instead of 97% idle).

The big deal will be the addition of Xen, LVM and RAID. I’m thinking about setting up a small domU that will act as a firewall. It will also run Apache as a reverse proxy and Postfix as a transport relay to the domains that will get their own DomU (3 currently). Normally I would also have it run Asterisk to avoid NATing with SIP, but since I switched to IAX with my voice provider, I don’t think it will be necessary.

Anyway, the lights might go out for a little while. Don’t be alarmed.