Fedora xen - Mar 2007 - RE: Is my guest hosed?

Wow, my first question to the list, and I stumped all of the experts ;-)

Let''s try a slightly different approach.

Does anyone have, or know where I can get a vmlinuz-2.6.17-1.????.fc5xenU
kernel file? I think if I could just find a kernel of that approximate
vintage, I''ll be able to at least boot the guest and get it going
again.

Thanks!

Brian
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brian Leyton [mailto:bleyton@cpe-corp.com] 
> Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2007 9:29 AM
> To: fedora-xen@redhat.com
> Subject: [Fedora-xen] Is my guest hosed?
> 
> I apologize - this is a long story, and I hope I can explain 
> it properly.
> 
> I''m somewhat new to Xen, but some time back I managed to get 
> a working installation going.  I used FC5, and had my guest 
> (also FC5) working fine, except for some occasional 
> unexplained crashes (but that''s a story for another time).
> 
> Yesterday, my guest crashed, and I could not get it to 
> restart.  I rebooted the host, without success.  I ran a yum 
> update on the host, and then Xen would not even start.  I 
> tried googling the error messages, and the indication I got 
> from that was that there was some incompatibility between the 
> Xen tools and Xen itself (I think this diagnosis turned out 
> to be wrong
> - more on that in a bit).
> 
> So I decided to try upgrading the host to FC6 (using yum), 
> the theory being that at least FC6 might have compatible 
> versions of everything together.
> When I did this, it complained about an old kernel version 
> (2.6.17) being incompatible with a couple of packages, so I 
> used RPM and removed this old kernel (bad move).
> 
> So FC6 installed properly, and after realizing that it was 
> booting with the non-xen-enabled kernel, it now works fine.  
> I have a feeling that this was my problem all along.  Wish I 
> had known that before...
> 
> In any case, I was able to get Xen started too.  But the 
> guest would not start up, because the kernel I had deleted 
> was the one that this guest needed.  I tried changing the 
> .cfg file to point to a newer kernel, but though the guest 
> would start up, it will not run properly with the newer kernel.
> 
> So I find myself stuck.  I searched but could not find a 
> 2.6.17 xen enabled kernel anywhere, and I can''t figure out 
> how to fix this guest.  It looks like some automatic yum 
> updating has updated the kernel on the guest as well (all of 
> the kernel files in /boot are 2.6.19), and I can''t find the 
> 2.6.17 in there.  I''m not sure why the updates that took 
> place on the guest would not have updated everything to run 
> with the 2.6.19 kernel, but it just does not work.
> 
> Anyone have an idea of how I can salvage this guest?
> 
> Brian 
> 
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> Fedora-xen mailing list
> Fedora-xen@redhat.com
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>

> Wow, my first question to the list, and I stumped all of the experts ;-)
>
> Let''s try a slightly different approach.
>
> Does anyone have, or know where I can get a vmlinuz-2.6.17-1.????.fc5xenU
> kernel file? I think if I could just find a kernel of that approximate
> vintage, I''ll be able to at least boot the guest and get it going
again.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Brian
>
Try this -- mount the guest partition (lvm or backing file, whatever you
used) into the dom0. Then, use yum to upgrade the guest to FC6. yum can
take a command line switch to point to a chroot path. So, if you mounted
the guest into /mnt/xen_guest, you would use yum as

yum --installroot=/mnt/xen_guest update

or something like that. You still may need to make a workable initrd as
well. There are threads here and on xensource covering the process.

I don''t think you''re going to fix an FC5 guest and get it to
run under
FC6. At least paravirtualized.

And BTW, I''m no expert, but I play one on the internet.

hth,

dave