• ISPConfig – been around a long time, seems quite mature
• Froxlor – an active fork of SysCP which has a decent reputation
• I-MSCP – a fork of ispCP which was a fork of VHCS which I know several people who supported

https://launchpad.net/~agent-8131/+archive/ppa/+packages

Design goals:

• packages created for xen 4.0.1 and xen 4.1.0
• packages mirror install of xen as closely as possible
• currently only hypervisor and utils are included (make xen and make tools)
• no rc.d scripts setup, that’s left to user
• should be installable and functional on Debian and Ubuntu and on several versions
  • Debian lenny (hopefully), squeeze
  • Ubuntu hardy (hopefully), lucid, maverick, natty

Things to work on:

• getting stubdom to compile so pvgrub is present
• testing on various systems and fixing dependencies and conflicts as needed

• Xen 4.0.1
  • linker error: /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lxenctrl
    • /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lxenctrl
    • [Pkg-xen-devel] Trying to compile/pack the Xen 4 for Debian fail…
    • [Xen-devel] Trying to compile Xen 4 for a Debian package fail – Xen Source
    • use this patch: [Xen-devel] Compile error for xen-4.0.1 if xen-tools is not inst – Xen Source
• Xen 4.1.0
  • ipxe – requires package for ipxe
• common:
  • linker error: ld: unrecognized option ‘-Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions’
    • [Xen-devel] XEN build failure – Xen Source
    • [bug-recutils] recfix tests fail on Ubuntu 64-Bit systems
    • fix: Re: [bug-recutils] recfix tests fail on Ubuntu 64-Bit systems
• packaging help:
  • How To Create A .DEB Package [Ubuntu / Debian] ~ Web Upd8: Ubuntu / Linux blog
  • How do I patch a Debian package
  • Packaging/PPA/BuildingASourcePackage – Launchpad Help

• rebooting from inside a DomU causes it to be destroyed.  This may be a problem with xl or with pygrub but I get the following error when rebooting: “failed to run bootloader: -3″
• confusion over xl/xm and xencommons/xend.  I’ve learned that I should run xencommons and use xl and not use xend and xm.  Running both xend and xencommons seemed to lead to stability issues.  Using xm was useless as my existing configurations would not work (problems with blktap2 and qcow2).  However xl worked fine as long as I removed any python code from the config files.
• pvgrub does not work.  While pvgrub seems like a much better alternative to pygrub I found that it would give me an error about the disk not being available.  This may just require a change to grub but that’s not ideal.  I want a drop-in secure replacement for pygrub.
• configuring the Dom0 kernel takes time.  You have to be somewhat careful on the options and there is extremely little documentation on the various Xen options.  I found that “CONFIG_XEN_DEV_EVTCHN=y” was better than a module since you need evtchn on the Dom0 always.
• problems with xenpm. running “xenpm get-cpufreq-states” led to an unkillable hung process and shortly thereafter a system lockup. See: xenpm bugs.

Helpful information:

• Xen 4.1 on Ubuntu 10.04 64bit » ZeroAccess (helpful info on compiling Xen 4.1.0 and a Dom0 kernel)
• Performance difference between Xen versions | Xen | Devel (information on performance and power saving)
• xenpm – Xen Wiki
• PvGrub – Xen Wiki
• PyGrub – Xen Wiki

• ipp2p – discontinued, recommends checking out opendpi: OpenDPI.org
• l7-filter – moved here: l7-filter | ClearFoundation

Though I’ve played with both of these in the past I’m not using either in production currently.  Most p2p programs are well behaved enough to mark data transfers as bulk which makes shaping easy.

piwik (1.2.1):

• automatic update from web (though be careful)
• assign user roles per website
• unlimited conversion tracking / goals
• support forum
• some bugs and broken reports – visitor log broken

owa (1.4.1):

• no flash
• better navigation (though this is subjective)
• latest visits works correctly with timezone
• tracks domstreams and dom clicks
• action tracking – could be very useful for search tracking
• goal funnels
• some bugs and broken reports – top pages today broken

Further reading:

• Comparison « Open Web Analytics
• why should I go with Piwik over Open Web Analytics (OWA)?

dovecotpw -s MD5-CRYPT -p password | sed ‘s/{MD5-CRYPT}//’

Then in the database:

update admin set password=’CRYPTED PASSWORD” where username=’USERNAME’;

I found how to do this here:

SourceForge.net: Postfix Admin: Topic: Postfixadmin mysql password storage method

Sadly a person installing Xem 4.0.1 on a freshly installed Debian 6.0 install is in for some trouble getting Xen to work.  You’ll see errors about hotplug scripts not working related to the tap driver.  The problem stems from Debian Bug #591456.  The solution is to create /etc/xen/scripts/hotplugpath.sh with the following contents:


SBINDIR="/usr/sbin"
BINDIR="/usr/bin"
LIBEXEC="/usr/lib/xen/bin"
LIBDIR="/usr/lib64"
SHAREDIR="/usr/share"
PRIVATE_BINDIR="/usr/lib64/xen/bin"
XENFIRMWAREDIR="/usr/lib/xen/boot"
XEN_CONFIG_DIR="/etc/xen"
XEN_SCRIPT_DIR="/etc/xen/scripts"


It’s also important to note that Debian stripped out the blktap2 module so only the blktap module is available in Debian 6.0 currently.  I’d follow Debian Bug #586772 to see if it ever gets re-added.  More likely blktap2 may be added through a backport at some point.

Next you might want to fix an error in /etc/xen/scripts/xen-hotplug-cleanup.  You can change line 24 from:

if [ $(xenstore-read "$vm_dev" 2>/dev/null) != "" ] \

to:

if [ "$(xenstore-read '$vm_dev' 2>/dev/null)" != "" ] \

Alternatives not guaranteed to work:

• [Bug 605182] New: /etc/xen/scripts/xen-hotplug-cleanup: line 24: [: !=:
• [Xen-devel] [PATCH] bug fix for “xen-hotplug-cleanup” script – Xen Source

Other bugs and problems:

• no pv_grub is present
• block-attach and block-detach in dom0 seem to not work – attach doesn’t seem to give a usable disk and detach fails unless the –force option is used
• domu’s do not have there xenstore entries cleaned up after shutting down (this may be fixed by patching xen-hotplug-cleanup)

All in all I’d say Xen 4.0.1 in Debian 6.0 is a mess.  Not sure if this is a buggy Xen release or related to Debian changes.  But I’d advise a lot of caution and testing before implementing a Xen server using Debian 6.0.

• Btrfs Did Regress Hard In The Linux 2.6.35 Kernel
• maverick btrfs slow install

But besides that I’m also hoping that the I/O performance situation will be improved.  It has been very difficult to track down where the bug is but I have certainly experienced it.  I haven’t tested the patches but if they work I hope they find there way into Ubuntu 10.10

• Fix “system goes unresponsive under memory pressure and lots of
  dirty/writeback pages” bug.
• Large I/O operations result in poor interactive performance and high iowait times
• The Linux Desktop Responsiveness Patches Are Feeling Good
• Heavy Disk I/O harms desktop responsiveness
• Very poor desktop response (high latency) during I/O-load with SATA+NCQ