Ubuntu Feisty Xen image available
Posted on | October 18, 2007 | 3 Comments
I’ve been promising several people for the past couple of months that I would make a Feisty Xen guest template when I got “around to it”.
Well, I got around to it and the template is available for download. You’ll find the md5′s in the directory listing.
The template was bootstrapped (32 bit) using debootstrap, I then made the following modifications:
- hwclock and console stuff disabled in init.d
- Installed SSH and friends
- Removed sound/usb stuff
- Installed libc6-xen (init never complained, so I did not rebuild it)
- Fixed a few things so the boot screen isn’t so mangled over the Xen serial redirect
- Setup a generic fstab (sda1 is / , sdb1 is swap)
- Configured aptitude to pull from Feisty main, universe and multiverse including the feisty-updates and feisty-security repositories.
- Several other very minor things that I can’t remember off the top of my head.
To use the template, you need only a working installation of Xen.
Get going by doing by un-archiving the template, creating a small swap virtual block device (file or LV backed, whatever), create a configuration file that looks something like this:
name = 'feisty'
memory = 128
kernel = '/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-xen'
root = '/dev/sda1 ro'
disk = ['phy:/guests/feisty/rootfs,sda1,w',
'phy:/guests/feisty/swap,sdb1,w' ]
vif = ['bridge=br0, mac=00:00:6d:8e:4c:31, vifname=feisty.0']
You’ll want to change the disk [] array to indicate your setup, and the type of block device you created (a loop device would of course be file:/). A swap image is included to get you started, as well as a sample Xen configuration file.
Typically, I use LVM for virtual block devices. File backed VBDs are rather slow 
Copy over the modules of whatever kernel you are using (most will be 2.6.18) to the /lib/modules/ directory of the VPS template, boot via xm create feisty.cfg then xm console your way in.
By default, eth0 wakes up wanting DHCP. Change that if you like in /etc/network/interfaces. The default root password is simply password and you can find a list of packages installed in /root (installed.packages iirc)
It might be a good idea to do an apt-get update and apt-get upgrade, depending on when you read this and snag the template. Any problems using these should be reported to tinkertim@gmail.com.
Happy Xenning
Update: 11/28/07
This image has been cleaned up and sent to jailtime.org as a contribution. Comments are welcome, however please post any serious issues with this image on the jailtime wiki.
Update: 9/17/08
I am through with Ubuntu. These images are no longer supported, nor will I be contributing more in the future. However, I will be making more for Debian as it evolves.
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3 Responses to “Ubuntu Feisty Xen image available”
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November 7th, 2007 @ 3:00 pm
David from jailtime reported a small issue, I completely forgot to setup the local loopback device on the image (i.e. 127.0.0.1 / localhost)
Add the following lines to /etc/network/interfaces to fix this:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
May 15th, 2008 @ 4:21 am
Is there any chance you could rebuild this with Ubuntu Hardy 8.04?
May 15th, 2008 @ 3:29 pm
@Nacho – Should be coming this week for at least amd64, I’ll also try to strap i386.
I’ll try to put out a script that does what I do to make these which can be run on any Hardy install (even a VPS) to produce templates. This would work with Hardy and future releases.