Archive
Posts from 2009
Redirecting the CentOS and Fedora Linux console to a serial port (virsh console edition)
During my KVM testing, I wanted to be able to use the virsh "console" command to access the console of my guests. This would make remote management a whole lot easier, since the default remote management interface (vnc) was a bit of overkill. To get virsh to allow me to console in, the first thing I did was update the menu.lst to get grub to write to the serial port: serial --speed=115200 --unit=0 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1 terminal --timeout=10 serial In addition to the two items above, you also need to make sure you disable the splash screen. Next up, I had to adjust the kernel entries in the menu.lst to write to the serial port (ttyS0)…
$ read more →Using yum to install the latest kernels on Fedora hosts
As you may surmise from several of my recent posts, I have been doing a ton of Linux virtualization (Xen, KVM, openvz) testing. In the case of KVM, numerous bug fixes are integrated into each kernel release, so it's often beneficial to stick to the bleeding edge kernels (though great for testing, I wouldn't feel comfortable running these in production). Fedora provides the latest and greatest kernels and virtualization packages (libvirt, qemu, etc.) in the rawhide repository, which you can access by setting the enabled flag to 1 in /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-rawhide.repo: Once you have the repository enabled, you can use yum to install the latest kernel: This will install the latest kernel, and allow you to take advantage of the latest Linux kernel features.
$ read more →Sun dropping support for the ROCK processor?
I just came across an OSNews report about Sun dropping development on the ROCK processor. At first I was a bit surprised by this, given the ROCK feature set Sun had been touting for several years. But in practice, this decision doesn't surprise me for a few reasons: 1. By the time the ROCK was feature complete and ready for market, Intel and AMD should be able to match its performance when you took cost into account…
$ read more →Create sasl accounts for libvirt
I have been playing around with libvirt, which is a virtualization toolkit that sits on top of the native virtualization technologies in various operating systems. Libvirt provides built-in support for managing remote nodes, which is useful when you need to enable one or more virtualization properties, or when you need to perform some type of administrative action (e.g., migrate a host to another machine). To allow secure access, libvirt supports transport layer security as well as authentication. TLS is typically used to secure the network transport, and SASL is used to provide authentication…
$ read more →Monitoring NFS operations with nfswatch
I support a number of NFS clients, and periodically need to see which types of NFS operations are being performed. The nfsstat utility works pretty well for this, but sometimes I want to get a broader view of what is going on. When these situations arise, I like to fire up the nfswatch utility which displays network traffic along with a listing of NFS operations: This is an awesome tool, and runs awesome on both Linux and Solaris hosts.
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