Linux

How to manually migrate a virtual machine from one host to another. The process is roughly: copy the guest config to the destination, create LVs on the destination, dd the LVs across ssh, instantiate and start the guest on the destination.

As I described in a previous post, I dedicate an LV in the host for each guest. The guest then uses LVM to manage the space. In this case the guest is contained in two logical volumes on the host.

If you've tried to fire up a chroot named on Fedora 11 you may have noticed it complains about missing configuration files such as named.dnssec.keys.

There is a bug that implies you should use SELINUX instead of chroot. But if you aren't ready for SELINUX, you can still run a chroot name server. Here is how.

After having my Sony Sat T-60 Series 1 DirecTiVo for about 8 years, I'm finally upgrading to a TiVo HD. It should be here soon, so in the meantime I need to do some research and prepare my home network for the addition.

To leverage my Mythdora MythTV box I want to support the following in Linux:

• Download video from TiVo to my MythTV
• Play video on the TiVo from my MythTV

Let's see how to do that...

Fedora 8 goes EOL next week, so it's time to upgrade. A yum upgrade is not the recommended way to upgrade, but it can work fine. The simpler a system is, the more likely this method is to succeed.

I just successfully upgraded my Fedora 8 text-only firewall and samba server using yum. Here are my notes from the process.

My encrypted home directory on my Fedora 10 laptop is filling up.
Let's expand it.

[root@seitan ~]# df -h /home
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/CryptHome
                       14G   13G  862M  94% /home

First identify the logical volume beneath this encrypted LUKS device.

[root@seitan ~]# grep CryptHome /etc/crypttab 
CryptHome /dev/VolGroup00/LVCryptHome none luks,check=ext2,retry=5

Then see what is available in LVM.

[root@seitan ~]# lvs

I just upgraded my laptop to Fedora 10, and it looks great now, but there were some snags. I'll try to dig into them later and see if they are bugzilla worthy.

For now I'll try to do a brain dump. I had problems with encrypted logical volumes, grub needed manual setup, my wireless device name changed.

Crypt FS Problem

Before the upgrade, I was running Fedora 9 with a drive layout as follows:

• sda1 as windows
• sda2 as /boot
• sda3 as a VG holding everything else
  • LVCryptHome was a LUKS volume holding /home
    

I have a Zimbra email server which contains a LDAP server housing all my users and their passwords. I would like to enable single signon for my linux machines. The only account details I'll be using from LDAP are the username and password.

The last time I did this, I did it the hard way and modified files in /etc/pam.d by hand. Using the authconfig command is much more convenient.
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The following has been tested on Fedora 9.

Configure PAM

I've been writing the Fedora Weekly News Virtualization Beat for several weeks now, and I've recently volunteered to work on the portion of Fedora 10 release notes which cover virtualization features.

Based on: Apache, PHP, Oracle Instant Client on Fedora 8 (64-bit) and Installing PHP and the Oracle 10g Instant Client for Linux and Windows.

I downloaded the instant client RPMs from Oracle to my local private yum repo that I use for in-house packages. Doesn't everyone have one of those? Then all ya gotta do is...

I had some trouble removing an dom0 LV used as a domU VG after mounting it to look inside that VG (for background on this setup, see this post). I wasn't sure what steps I had taken, so I decided to reboot the dom0 to clear the decks and did the following experiment.

The goal was to create an LV and stack upon that a VG containing an LV and then remove these devices to get back where we started. And maybe to learn something along the way.