XceptN's IT Blog

Oct
08
2010

0

Mercurial (hg) Fails with “abort: error: Name or service not known” via a Proxy

If you are behind a firewall and you need to access a proxy server to connect, even if you had set the http_proxy environment variable properly, you still get:

$ hg clone https://xenbits.xensource.com/xen-unstable.hg
abort: error: Name or service not known

The Mercurial (hg) does not get the proxy setting from the environment. Instead you can set it up in the $HOME/.hgrc file:

[http_proxy]

host=<your_proxy_server>:<your_proxy_port>

and you will be able to proceed with the hg operations.

Written by XceptN in: linux, virtualization, xen |

Oct
06
2010

0

First Step to Become a Xen Guru

As you mostly know Xen is open source industry standard virtualization. From http://xen.org:

The Xen® hypervisor, the powerful open source industry standard for virtualization, offers a powerful, efficient, and secure feature set for virtualization of x86, x86_64, IA64, ARM, and other CPU architectures. It supports a wide range of guest operating systems including Windows®, Linux®, Solaris®, and various versions of the BSD operating system

The term “guru” may be controversial, but even if you want to become an expert, you should always go into the source code. Therefore yhe best way to begin is to get the latest source archive of Xen, build and install it. Give it a shot!…

Written by XceptN in: virtualization, xen |

Apr
02
2010

0

How to force a fsck after reboot?

For various reasons you may want to force a check (fsck) of a filesystem you currently use (most likely the root / filesystem as you cannot umount it on-the-go). To achieve that do: (below is for the / mount)

# touch /forcefsck

and after the reboot you’ll see that the fsck is being done.

Written by XceptN in: linux |

Apr
01
2010

0

Fedora 12 / boot / initrd / initramfs

I have been using Fedora 12 (under HVM - Oracle VM 2.2) to build latest
kernels from git (kernel.org), identify bugs, bisect, build and test.

On Xen HVM Fedora 12 is quite slow (a full kernel build takes 3.5
hrs). I have noticed
that initrd / mkinitrd does not have a future as Fedora 12 uses dracut
to create initramfs (and initramfs - not initrd - check this nice blog entry).

The
initramfs initially was 60 GB and it took ages for the guest to boot up
.. Unbearable! .. With the idea by jch to remove plymouth
(graphical boot) from initramfs - by telling dracut not to include it I
added the following to /etc/dracut.conf file:
omit_dracutmodules=”plymouth”
That made my initramfs file of 45MB size - which is still big but at least bootup takes shorter time. Now I can bisect happily