JHJE (Jan Holst Jensen)
2005-Sep-02 10:16 UTC
[Xen-users] Fixed MAC address causes spurios network connectivity loss.
Dear list. I have been running 5 domUs on a Xen server for two weeks without problems, except for one of the machines. That machine has an erratic network connection and it only occurs when I specify the MAC address. On the other four VMs, Xen chooses a MAC address automatically - in fact I have no "Vif =" lines at all in their configuration files. The machine used to run on a VMware server, therefore the artificial MAC address as you see below: kernel = "/boot/vmlinuz-2.6-xenU" memory = 64 name = "sc30" disk = [ ''phy:vm-disks/sc30-root,sda1,w'', ''phy:vm-disks/sc30-swap,sda2,w'' ] root = "/dev/sda1 ro" # Fixate the MAC address, so flexlm won''t complain if we move the VM. vif = [''mac=00:50:56:00:00:01''] At times, the machine will become unping-able, ssh connections to it will freeze and eventually abort (putty terminal from a Windows client), and then a few seconds or minutes later everything will be working again. While the network loss is going on, I can still ping the machine from domain-0. Is this a misconfiguration of the vif bridge or could it be some unfortunate caching in a network router/switch ? If I uncomment the "vif = " line in the configuration file the VM''s network is rock solid, but I need a fixed MAC address because of the flex license manager that runs on the VM. I''m running Xen 2.0.6 with Debian Sarge in domain-0, various RedHat domUs. Cheers -- Jan Holst Jensen Principal Research Scientist Scientific Computing Novo Nordisk A/S Denmark _______________________________________________ Xen-users mailing list Xen-users@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users