At work I am just beginning the process of migrating from a hosted dedicated server to a Xen instance on a new server we have. Our dedicated server runs centos, and has WHM cpanel installed. So I figured it would be a good thing to have cpanel again as several people are familiar with it, and we do host a few random websites for people still. Cpanel does not support debian to my knowledge so Centos 5 sounds like the best way to go.
Centos 5 is supported by a newer xen-tools package than what is provided in etch so I added /etc/apt/sources.list.d/xen-tools.list with the content# # Steve Kemp's repository: Etch # deb http://apt.steve.org.uk/etch etch main non-free contrib deb-src http://apt.steve.org.uk/etch etch main non-free contrib
Once that was done a simple aptitude update and aptitude dist-upgrade updated xen-tools to a newer version.
There is a new tool called rinse that can bootstrap rpm based distros like centos and fedora. Since I want a centos 5 domu I issue the xen-create-image with the following command
xen-create-image --hostname centos5_domU --ip 192.168.1.50 --install-method rinse --force --dist centos-5 --arch=amd64
No errors with the command so everything looks ok, try booting the guest vm up with
xm create centos5_domU.cfg -c
uh oh, something went wrong, the domU would not finish booting checkout the output
INIT: version 2.86 booting
mount: error while loading shared libraries: libblkid.so.1: cannot open shared object file:No such file or directory
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 31: /etc/init.d/functions: No such file or directory
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 34: fstab_decode_str: command not found
Welcome to CentOS release 5 (Final)
Press 'I' to enter interactive startup.
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 265: update_boot_stage: command not found
Cannot access the Hardware Clock via any known method.
Use the --debug option to see the details of our search for an access method.
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 301: action: command not found
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 314: strstr: command not found
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 326: strstr: command not found
/sbin/start_udev: line 36: /etc/init.d/functions: No such file or directory
Non-volatile memory driver v1.2
Floppy drive(s): fd0 is unknown type 15 (usb?), fd1 is unknown type 15 (usb?)
Failed to obtain physical IRQ 6
floppy0: no floppy controllers found
lp: driver loaded but no devices found
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 356: strstr: command not found
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 362: update_boot_stage: command not found
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 395: update_boot_stage: command not found
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 396: action: command not found
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 408: update_boot_stage: command not found
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 432: strstr: command not found
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 441: strstr: command not found
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 458: strstr: command not found
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 466: strstr: command not found
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 495: strstr: command not found
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 499: strstr: command not found
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 623: strstr: command not found
Checking filesystems
fsck: error while loading shared libraries: libblkid.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 657: failure: command not found
*** An error occurred during the file system check.
*** Dropping you to a shell; the system will reboot
*** when you leave the shell.
Give root password for maintenance
(or type Control-D to continue):
Now what? Well we start debugging. I quickly tried creating a centos4 domU the same way, and it booted without issue. So there must be somethng wrong with the creation of the centos5 domU. Since its bootstrapped with rinse thats a good place to start.
A quick glance at man rinse show us how to use rinse by itself. So lets try bootstrapping a centos 5.
rinse --distribution centos-5 --directory=/tmp/centos-test --arch=amd64
and by looking at the rinse output
we can see that indeed our problem is bootstrapping with rinse.
…. and the debugging continues