Maintaining Xen with FAI - Questions

[Mario Bischof]

On Nov 30, 2006, at 2:08 PM, Henning Sprang wrote:

> On 11/29/06, Michael Tautschnig <tautschn at model.in.tum.de> wrote:
>> [...]
>> > already NFS support built into my domU-kernel. But what else do i
>> > need to be ready to use fai with xen?
>> >
>> Network, disk, NFS should be about it...
>
> and IP PNP, in case the installserver address and ip should come via
> dhcp as usually with FAI.
> Debian Xen kernels lack all these AFAIK.
>
> I think, You also want to use ide disk in the DomU,  as there are some
> conflicts between nfs root and the scsi driver, if I remember
> correctly - I had that problem and there where mails about this on
> this list and on xen-users some months ago... but I am not really sure
> anymore and too lazy to look it up now.
>
> Henning


Thanks for all your replies!

It's working now with custom kernel, IP PNP DHCP wasnt in my domU  
kernel and there was no support for the disk, I assumed this should  
be in the config as standard, so i didnt even check if it was in it.  
I used to have a config with scsi disks, but now i changed to ide and  
its working.

I have some basic questions about using xen with custom configuration.

should you use a custom hypervisor as well? or could you use the one  
from debian?

Since i've been using xen, i always built it from source with two  
custom kernels, but now as I want to use FAI to install my servers, I  
dont know exactly what should be wise to do, because all of the  
software has to be packaged into deb-files to install it.

I guess its rather complicated to compile the xen-utils manually and  
create a deb-pkg. So can you use debian's pkgs for the admin- 
utilities and custom kernels together? I've seen that it's working  
but maybe that's a foolish thing to do (?)


Mario