How to mess up your Xen guest (make it nearly useless)

January 8, 2008 3 comments »

I made some changes to a VBD based Xen server – here’s what not to do:

  1. Use a password in the httpd cert – if I ran xm console server I did not see that prompt – needed to use the vnc/gui to see this – entered it and got closer
  2. Spaces in device names using system-config-network – eg; eth0 was actually saved as "eth0 " – that extra space messed up starting of "eth0" and other network devices. I will bugzilla this one.
  3. Pretty GUI’s are not a sign of weakness – this time it showed me what 6 hours of console hacking did not. Score +1 for the GUI!!!

Network trouble: www.linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/lfs-support/2003-December/021076.html
solution: cd /etc; find . -print | grep ifcfg – delete any that are easily replaced – I removed all but the primary IP interface.

Mounting xen vbd img files:
http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Mounting_a_Linux_LVM_volume.html
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tip/19568.html

Now if anyone share how to effectively mount Linux LVM from a server.img file that looks like – I can mount the ext3 boot partition, but not the Linux LVM using lomount or other techniques:


[root@server vm]# fdisk -l /dev/loop0

Disk /dev/loop0: 16.7 GB, 16777216000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2039 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

      Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/loop0p1   *           1          13      104391   83  Linux
/dev/loop0p2              14        2039    16273845   8e  Linux LVM

as Lundberg would say “That would be great”

PHP memory limit results in blank pages

November 5, 2007 No comments »

From a Drupal install, got a blank page when logging in….


[Mon Nov 05 13:20:36 2007] [error] [client 71.139.36.123] PHP Fatal error:
Allowed memory size of 16777216 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 92160 bytes) in
/home/someuser/public_html/modules/event/event_timezones.inc on line 331, referer: http://example.com/

Up the memory in php.ini a few MB, restart httpd and all was working..

DNS Troubleshooting

November 1, 2007 No comments »

Yeah, its 5am – got clients that rely on me to get things done…

DNS: Best free tool to use: http://www.dns.lu/en/EN-LUTestNoms.php

If seeing “not advertising as nameserver”, that means in the zone file that server is not listed:

mochabomb.com.  IN      NS ns1.mochabomb.com.
mochabomb.com.  IN      NS ns2.mochabomb.com.
mochabomb.com.  IN      NS ns4.mochabomb.com.

.. for the server it resides on – and that record can be a slave record, just need to add all slaves in the master DNS server so that the slave server advertizes itself as an authority….

In /etc/named.conf is where a zone is set as master or slave. A slave can be authoritative if its name is listed/resolved by the master record.

Easy WordPress Upgrade…

October 28, 2007 1 comment »

0. Deactivate modules that might conflict/break with upgrade…
1. Have backups of your wordpress files and database..
2. I used ssh for the upgrade, so I untar’d the tar.gz file somewhere.
3. cp -rp wordpress/* ../../blog/ *this copies over all new files to old location, leaving old files intact.
4. somedomain.com/blogdir/wp-admin/upgrade.php – click click done…

Exodus maintenance

No comments »

Exodus is down for maintenance (making some security updates) – will be back up in 15 minutes.
2:10am – Exodus back up