Well, my attempt at migrating to 8.10 was an utter failiure due to lack of Xen support, and the alternative (official) virtualisation tech, KVM, I really didn’t get on with.

Given I don’t really need it (use of Xen was as much about seeing if I could actually get it working as actually doing anything with it) I’ve now binned that in favor of a single Ubuntu 8.10 Server platform hosting stuff. Tune in later for more info on what I have put in place, and what I’m doing with it.

Additionally I mean to talk about my continuing adventures in netbooks, and the current target of my swearing, upnp streaming…

As such I’ll be restarting the documentation from scratch, even if the only persona that will use it is me, when I invariably screw the machine up

Anyway, I’m going to go through all the steps I followed to build the system, as it stands

This post will focus primarily on the Host Domain, Dom0.

The first step was to grab a copy of the 64-bit Ubuntu Server 8.04 disc from the Ubuntu. In the meantime I decided on the disc layout.

As far as the OS is concerned there are two volumes available:

• /dev/sda – the RAID 5 volume
• /dev/sdb – the boot volume

(I have no idea why the OS insisted on assigning the volumes thus, as the Bios has them the other way round, but on balence I decided I really didn’t care )

Anyway the disc layout is as follows:

1. /dev/sda1 – RAID 5 Array
2. /dev/sdb1 – /boot
3. /dev/sdb2 – /
4. /dev/sdb3 – swap
5. /dev/sdb4 – lvm

The lvm will play host to a series of volumes – the discs for the various guest domains.

To install simply boot from the CD and follow through the steps as presented. Disc formatting as above, and then creating user accounts when prompted. The only service I installed at this point was OpenSSH server.

Reboot, and log on

I decided to install Webmin on all the xen domains to simplify admin of various services so the next stage is to add the relevant repos to /etc/apt/sources.list – simply add the following to the bottom of the file:

deb http://download.webmin.com/download/repository sarge contrib

Next, simply update the package list and install any updates:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Install Webmin and LVM

sudo apt-get install webmin lvm2

Webmin, however, is ouside the scope of this so we’ll pass gently over it and continue…

As mentioned earlier, I’m using an LVM to host the volumes for the various guest domains. We only need to create the physical volume and volume groups – the individual logical volumes will be created automatically when we create the various guest domains.

sudo pvcreate /dev/sda4

This initializes the appropriate volume for use in an LVM.

sudo vgcreate xen /dev/sda4

This creates a LVM volume group with the name xen using the appropriate volume.

Finally (for this guide at least), we need to install the Xen tools:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-xen-server

Once complete reboot and we’ll then start with configuring Xen as a whole, and the individual domains. We will go into this in more detail next time…

Before I talk about the new shiny, I’ll begin with some background – specifically what is currently in place…

Hardware is:

• Antec NSK2400 case
• Asus M2NPV motherboard
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ CPU
• 2gig DDR2 SDRAM
• XFX GeForce 7600 with Zallman silent cooler
• Hauppage WinTV Nova-T 500 dual DVB tuner

As you can tell from the spec, the machine was designed to be a HTPC. It’s running a custom distribution of Ubuntu called Mythbuntu which is heavily optimised towards use for MythTV.

In very broad strokes MythTV is roughly analagous to Windows MCE however it’s a *lot* more capable. It works on a client/server model with no real limits as to the number of either and is highly extendable through the use of various plugins (such as for DVD and video playback, music, web browser and even controlling the system over the web).

Anyway to this I have added a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server setup which hosts a handful of services including the aforementioned MythWeb and also a web-based torrenting app called Torrentflux.

The machine also runs Samba for file sharing duties with Windows.

Anyway, thats the background. My place of work recently had a very tempting offer on for some hardware that caught my eye and started this whole project off. The machine was a HP ProLiant ML110 G5 with the following spec:

• 1x 2.33 GHz Intel Dual Core Xeon 3065
• 1GB DDR2 Memory
• 250Gb SATA HDD

Along with this I picked up the following:

• 3Ware 9650se 4-port RAID card
• 4x Seagate 7200.10 750Gig HDDs
• 4GB DDR2 Memory

The aim of the project is to move all server applications to the new machine. The system will run on the existing 250gig HDD, and the four 750gig HDD’s will be configured into a RAID-5 array (at a guess it will be a bit over 2Tb in total). I will be attempting to set up Xen Virtualisation on the machine, running three seperate guest domains:

• MythTV Master backend server – TV Tuner will be moved from the existing HTPC to this machine and all ‘back-end’ functionality will be handled here.
• LAMP Server – Running the current services along with Jinzora, a streaming media server
• File server – Having exclusive access to the RAID array this guest domain will host files across the network.

There are a number of roadblocks in my way – for a start I have never used Xen before, or RAID, and I know from research that getting the TV tuner into the guest domain is going to be a bit of a trick too, so wish me luck!

The idea of this blog is to discuss various techie… things – anything from new shiny bits of kit, or interesting software through to fairly detailed descriptions of projects I’m working on.

At the moment I am just starting of a home server project so that will form the bulk of my initial posts…