Slicehost

I've been trying out various Xen providers.

I have to say slicehost seems to be really good right now.

Of course they are new so we'll have to see how they fair over the next few years.

Xen upgrade

I changed the production box from FC5beta1 to FC5 on Sunday. Now I can use normal Xen kernels. Previously the beta1 Xen snapshot had some kind of binary incompatability so I was forced to use only Fedora binary or hand compiled kernels to run the guests.
It went very well except I didn't know that Fedora minimal install required discs 1 and 2 now so I had to drive home in the middle of the upgrade. Kind of a hassle.

What the heck is wrong with a single disc minimal install?

So long Linode

I moved the blog from Linode today.  It's been a good run but time to move on.

FC5 Xen

Got FC5beta2 Xen guests working tonight. I got caught by something stupid - the FC5guest kernel xennet support was built as a module. I like to get modules working last but in this case I needed to get them going first, build the initrd, and alias eth0 to xennet in order to get networking started during boot. :-(

Domain 0 allocation is too small for kernel image

I've been battling this bug for about two weeks.

Then I spotted this gem on #xen

11:04 < tab> it's about the fedora xen kernels
11:05 < tab> and the memory issue
11:05 < tab> did you changed the ld layout of the kernel ?
11:06 < riel> no, 2.6.13 did
11:06 < tab> yes, but did you tweak it to be able to run xen ?
11:06 < riel> I tried to
11:06 < riel> but it's still not getting linked right
11:06 < tab> because I use to have the same problem in the early 2.6.13 port
11:06 < tab> used*
11:06 < riel> how did you fix it ?
11:06 < tab> you have to redefine LOAD_OFFSET to 0 in page.h
11:07 < tab> I'm almost done with 2.6.13 anyways, and I will upgrade the repository soon I think
11:08 < riel> ohhhhhh
11:08 < riel> too bad Fedora is on 2.6.14-rc3
11:08 * riel is seriously considering not having Xen in Fedora again until xenolinux is upstream