Xen users - Dec 2006 - fedora core 6 domU on Opensuse 10.2 dom0 - fsck at each boot

Hi,
I bootstrapped fedora with yum, and everything seems to work fine.

I have only one problem: the installed fedora system always wants to
make a filesystem check for the root file system on /dev/xvda1, on
every start and reboot.

The system boots and runs fine with no other errors in any log, no
matter if I answer y or n on the fsck question at bootup.

Seems like it could be solved by looking at fedora init scripts line
by line, but this could take some while -  maybe I am not the only one
who had that problem.

Are there better ways to install Fedora on Suse than using yum?
Rpmstrap sounded nice for a while, but seems completely outdated and
not further developed anymore.
Anaconda is really heavy, I want something simpole tazt installs into
a directory, but i could try to boot it and let anaconda do the
install just as on fedora dom0 if nothing else works.

Henning

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users

Henning Sprang wrote:
> I have only one problem: the installed fedora system always wants to
> make a filesystem check for the root file system on /dev/xvda1, on
> every start and reboot.
Do you have a clock problem?
> Are there better ways to install Fedora on Suse than using yum?
> Rpmstrap sounded nice for a while, but seems completely outdated and
> not further developed anymore.
> Anaconda is really heavy, I want something simpole tazt installs into
> a directory, but i could try to boot it and let anaconda do the
> install just as on fedora dom0 if nothing else works.
Kickstart?

-- 
Christopher G. Stach II


_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users

On Fri, 2006-12-22 at 02:20 +0100, Henning Sprang wrote:
> Hi,
> I bootstrapped fedora with yum, and everything seems to work fine.
> 
> I have only one problem: the installed fedora system always wants to
> make a filesystem check for the root file system on /dev/xvda1, on
> every start and reboot.
Is there per chance a symlink in /dev named ''root'' or
''rootfs'' that
points (broken) to /dev/xvda1 ? Removing it may solve that problem if it
exists.
> 
> The system boots and runs fine with no other errors in any log, no
> matter if I answer y or n on the fsck question at bootup.
> 
> Seems like it could be solved by looking at fedora init scripts line
> by line, but this could take some while -  maybe I am not the only one
> who had that problem.
I usually stop (disable) the init scripts (I think its checkfs on
fedora?) and do this on dom-0 as part of my startup script for the
guest. I found that if a guest crashes, fsck doesn''t quite work from
within the guest and its an endless cycle of reboots. Same thing with
CentOS.
> 
> Are there better ways to install Fedora on Suse than using yum?
> Rpmstrap sounded nice for a while, but seems completely outdated and
> not further developed anymore.
Not that I''ve found, unless you use a pre-made template and copy over
the needed stuff in /etc and modules. I''d also love to find a better
way. There are some, but I''m not sure if you''ll like them ..
> Anaconda is really heavy, I want something simpole tazt installs into
> a directory, but i could try to boot it and let anaconda do the
> install just as on fedora dom0 if nothing else works.
A nice point and click system to deploy fc4/centos/ (anything yum based)
with packages you select or drag and drop is my eventual goal too.
Unfortunately as you said rpmstrap isn''t the best way to do it.

So far I have tried :

Making a small (udev, coreutils, libs/so''s and the bare bones basics)
template, and copy over a script in init.d that installs what you want
on first boot then removes itself to /root. This drove me nuts because
in some cases I need to rely on yum dependencies, and in others I
don''t,
and no two distros seem to be close to the same when it comes to yum
suggesting packages. Maddening, but easiest to throw together if you
don''t mind cleaning up after the script a bit.

Played with making a package and putting my own mirror in yum''s
sources .. i.e. "int-lamp-default-php5"
"int-lamp-default-mysql5" but
again getting things in the right order and dealing with deps is
maddening.

Part of my problem is I have been in Debian land so long that I''ve
fallen out of touch with other distros. If you manage to come up with
something that works, please share :)

Best,
-Tim

> 
> Henning
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Xen-users mailing list
> Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
> http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users

On 12/22/06, Christopher G. Stach II <cgs@ldsys.net>
wrote:
> Henning Sprang wrote:
> > I have only one problem: the installed fedora system always wants to
> > make a filesystem check for the root file system on /dev/xvda1, on
> > every start and reboot.
>
> Do you have a clock problem?
How would I realize?

It seems like an initrd made on suse already does the fsck that
happens on start, and then fedora tries to do it again. I see one call
to fsck before i see "INIT" in the output of the booting system, but
after I see that INIT, fsck comes again, and I get warning that
running it against a mounted fs is a problem, and I have to answer y
or n. Looks like I have to dig in the initrd.
Or just stop and assume that on a suse domU you are better off running
nothing else but SuSE.
> Kickstart?
then the question is: can I set up a kickstart server on Suse? or do i
need a fedora system, as install server, which is then responsible to
install a VM running on the suse server?

I really thought of something very simple - bootstrapping with a
script. What else is system installation but copying some files and
adjusting a config? There should be no need to add maultiple layers of
software to be able to achieve this...

For example, debian can be bootstrapped  so easy  with debootstrap
under every distribution, and the yum-bootstrapped other systems all
work fine on debian. Only trying to run/install fedora on suse and
vice versa seems to be very hard work or impossible.

Henning

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users

On 12/22/06, Henning Sprang <henning_sprang@gmx.de>
wrote:
> I have only one problem: the installed fedora system always wants to
> make a filesystem check for the root file system on /dev/xvda1, on
> every start and reboot.
O.K. I came up with the idea that it might be wise to use an initrd
that I built on the defora domU using the kernel and modules from suse
(which it should run).

Then I don''t have to care anymore about the incompatibilities of the
intrd features.

In the meantime I found out that yum segfaults when trying to install
a package... see what this is...

Henning

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users

Henning Sprang wrote:
> Hi,
> I bootstrapped fedora with yum, and everything seems to work fine.
>
> I have only one problem: the installed fedora system always wants to
> make a filesystem check for the root file system on /dev/xvda1, on
> every start and reboot.
Make sure that your Xen configuration uses the "ro" kernel option: I 
just ran into this while throwing debris out of a Xen configuration. 
(selinux=0 and hard-coding the runlevel is foolish, they should be 
controlled by the installed guest operating system configuration itself.)
> The system boots and runs fine with no other errors in any log, no
> matter if I answer y or n on the fsck question at bootup.
>
> Seems like it could be solved by looking at fedora init scripts line
> by line, but this could take some while -  maybe I am not the only one
> who had that problem.
>
> Are there better ways to install Fedora on Suse than using yum?
> Rpmstrap sounded nice for a while, but seems completely outdated and
> not further developed anymore.
> Anaconda is really heavy, I want something simpole tazt installs into
> a directory, but i could try to boot it and let anaconda do the
> install just as on fedora dom0 if nothing else works.
Tarball of a built system, such as those at www.jailtime.org, works well 
for me.

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users

On 12/22/06, Henning Sprang <henning_sprang@gmx.de>
wrote:
> [...]
> In the meantime I found out that yum segfaults when trying to install
> a package... see what this is...
Solved: when boostrapping fedora on suse with yum, the rpm db of the
domU needs rebuilding... no idea why, on debian this just worked.

Henning

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users

On 12/22/06, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Henning Sprang wrote:
> > I have only one problem: the installed fedora system always wants to
> > make a filesystem check for the root file system on /dev/xvda1, on
> > every start and reboot.
> Make sure that your Xen configuration uses the "ro" kernel
option: I
> just ran into this while throwing debris out of a Xen configuration.
> (selinux=0 and hard-coding the runlevel is foolish, they should be
> controlled by the installed guest operating system configuration itself.)
 yes, that solved it. thanks a lot! I think i removed the ro when some
other domu was misbehaving, and removing the ro solved that in turn.
Then I copied this template.

Henning

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users

>On 12/22/06, Henning Sprang <henning_sprang@gmx.de> wrote:
>> [...]
>> In the meantime I found out that yum segfaults when trying to install
>> a package... see what this is...
>
>Solved: when boostrapping fedora on suse with yum, the rpm db of the
>domU needs rebuilding... no idea why, on debian this just worked.
>
>Henning
Now you made me curious... how can I set up a Fedora DomU? Tbh, never
found much that looked like a promising simple howto :)

Is there any link you wouldn''t mind sharing with me/us? :)
Or can it be said with 3-4 words how to set it up using e.g a Debian
host system?

Regards, Bigfoot29
(And merry Xmas...)


_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users

On 12/23/06, bigfoot29 <bigfoot29@www.bios.kicks-ass.org>
wrote:
> [...]
> Now you made me curious... how can I set up a Fedora DomU? Tbh, never
> found much that looked like a promising simple howto :)
>
> Is there any link you wouldn''t mind sharing with me/us? :)
> Or can it be said with 3-4 words how to set it up using e.g a Debian
> host system?
I try it with 3-4 words, cause I don''t have the links at hand from
which I puzzled this together:

Just install yum, use a yum.conf for fedora repositories, and install
with --installroot=/path/to/mounted/vm/volume groupinstall Base.

That''s about it. and the things I wrote here which were the last
missing bits. SuSE can also be bootstrapped that way... (actually, on
suse, you must not use the "ro" in the root config variable in the vm
config - that really was my fault, and it is really different like
that in suse)

I think this way never will be really supported by suse and fedora,
cause they want us to use their funny installers instead of a simple
script, but for now it works quite well. But it would be really nice
if they''d fully support bootstrapping systems with yum, so people
curious about other distributions have an easier and simple life - and
install with a simple shell command...

Henning

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users

bigfoot29 wrote:
>> On 12/22/06, Henning Sprang <henning_sprang@gmx.de> wrote:
>>     
>>> [...]
>>> In the meantime I found out that yum segfaults when trying to
install
>>> a package... see what this is...
>>>       
>> Solved: when boostrapping fedora on suse with yum, the rpm db of the
>> domU needs rebuilding... no idea why, on debian this just worked.
>>
>> Henning
>>     
>
> Now you made me curious... how can I set up a Fedora DomU? Tbh, never
> found much that looked like a promising simple howto :)
>   
Save yourself the grief: go to www.jailtime.org.


_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users