libvirt users - Jul 2010 - Hello world help needed

I am trying to work my way up the learning curve through
a forest of conflicting and mostly non-working examples
and help pages spread about the internet.

I have had no trouble getting a basic vm to build
and to then start it up. But I have utterly failed
to gain access to the machine.

The only host I have available that can run it is a
remote server. I have not got the networking side
working yet, but I can live with that for the moment
because I have thus far not been able to get access
to a simple console on the vm.

Here is the machine:

<domain type='kvm' id='2'>
  <name>ubuntu</name>
  <uuid>8904d893-87dc-dc1f-0219-486745a370f6</uuid>
  <memory>262144</memory>
  <currentMemory>262144</currentMemory>
  <vcpu>1</vcpu>
  <os>
    <type arch='x86_64' machine='pc-0.12'>hvm</type>
    <boot dev='hd'/>
  </os>
  <features>
    <acpi/>
  </features>
  <clock offset='utc'/>
  <on_poweroff>destroy</on_poweroff>
  <on_reboot>restart</on_reboot>
  <on_crash>destroy</on_crash>
  <devices>
    <emulator>/usr/bin/kvm</emulator>
    <disk type='file' device='disk'>
      <source file='/home/myhome/ubuntu-kvm/tmpl3Xutj.qcow2'/>
      <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/>
    </disk>
    <interface type='network'>
      <mac address='52:54:00:be:d5:c2'/>
      <source network='default'/>
      <target dev='vnet0'/>
      <model type='virtio'/>
    </interface>
    <input type='mouse' bus='ps2'/>
    <graphics type='vnc' port='5900' autoport='yes'
listen='127.0.0.1'/>
    <video>
      <model type='cirrus' vram='9216' heads='1'/>
    </video>
    <serial type='pty'>
     <source path='/dev/pts/2'/>
     <target port='0'/>
    </serial>
    <console type='pty' tty='/dev/pts/2'>
     <source path='/dev/pts/2'/>
     <target port='0'/>
    </console>
  </devices>
  <seclabel type='dynamic' model='apparmor'>
    <label>libvirt-8904d893-87dc-dc1f-0219-486745a370f6</label>
   
<imagelabel>libvirt-8904d893-87dc-dc1f-0219-486745a370f6</imagelabel>
  </seclabel>
</domain>

I dumped the original and added the pty stuff from an example, but
when I create it and connect to the console:

	# virsh -c qemu:///system create ubuntu2.xml --console
	Domain ubuntu created from ubuntu2.xml
	Connected to domain ubuntu
	Escape character is ^]

nothing appears and nothing I type echoes. 
At least I can escape though...

I seem to have no trouble creating them, but it sure would
be nice to be able to access them. 

Oh, and btw. Every time I create a VM with the ubuntu 

  ubuntu-vm-builder kvm  hardy --mem 256 --iso
/path/to/ubuntu-8.10-server-i386.iso

  ubuntu-vm-builder kvm  lucid --mem 256 --iso ubuntu-10.04-server-amd64.iso

It leaves a loopback disk behind that never goes away. I've
had to reboot the server once already and upped loop_max to 32
so I would be able to work longer before doing so again.

I have still not managed to get the monitor to work,
but at least I've got vnc and ssh so that's some
progress.

I've had to bump the loop_max value *way* up to let
me get any work done... it's not just failed builds
that seem to hang a loopback forever, it appears that
any vm build leaves a loopback behind that can only
be removed by reboot, and servers are not things you
reboot very often. Under normal conditions the server
I was working on might get rebooted once a year. Or 
less.

But I have made some progress. Next item: qemu indicates
that it can map a host drive to the VM, and I need to
do this. I've got a 1.5TB drive that the new VM has to
mount. I cannot seem to see how to express this mapping
of host /dev/sdc to an internal VM mount.

Any one know how to do it?