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Reply With Quotedhicks (25th November 2009)
Has anyone got Xentools onto Smoothwall NG? Or (if Tom's watching) do Smoothwall have a solution for this already (have had a browse through the support site, but nothing mentioned.
Cheers
I'm watching, yeahI believe it has been done - but as far as I know, you have to use SmoothWall outside of the paravirtualised mode.
Will get some more info on this and get back to you.
I've just been told by SmoothWall technical support that SmoothWall doesn't work under Xen. The install procedure seems to run okay, but when SmoothWall reboots after install it doesn't bring any ethernet interfaces up. Running "ifconfig -a" shows me an ethC and ethD, and if I give ethC an IP address and bring it up ("ifconfig ethC 10.0.0.2", "ifconfig ethC up") I can ping 10.0.0.2 from my workstation and get a reply, however I can't log in to any web interface on 10.0.0.2 (I assume because nothing's listening).Originally Posted by Willott
Willott: did you configure a Xen VM to run SmoothWall? If so, how did you get the networking to work?
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David Hicks
We're actually buggering about with various virtualisation platforms in the office today - got NG looking fine on Xen, albeit not the paravirtualised one. Compatibility with more hypervisors (and full support) is high on our list.
I'm not in the office tomorrow, but call and speak to Rob Faulkner - 0113 3874181 see what he can help you with.
dhicks (25th November 2009)
Is there any eta with this / beta testing? Or anything we can do to help with testing? I'm also interested in SG on Xen, mainly so I can convert my last ESXi host over (it's holding the SG vm).
Pete,
No ETA on "make it perfect" - tho working paravirtualised on Xen should be in before the end of next year, but we already have NG on a couple of Xen servers. One seems to have worked a whole metric buttload easier than the other. I am a few steps removed from the process ATM though - I will call Rob and point him in this general direction ;-P
Running Xenserver 5.0 update 3 and have it running successfully (though possibly a little slowly due to the kind of virtualisation used). I believe that there's someone at Smoothwall running a cluster of NGs on Xen (the hardcore kind, not the Citrix version), so it definitely runs. I didn't have any issues with networking - created a new machine with a single interface in Xenserver, ran install - configuring NIC. Job done (as far as I remember). Sorry I can't be more help! Maybe try reinstalling with a single NIC, then add a second once you have the first working (it's strange that they show as ethC and ethD tbh).
@Tom: I'd be happy to test any Xen Kernel stuff if you need it - I believe for Xen support it's a kernel patch (I seem to remember Imran finding a link to something of use) - get on with it
Possibly useful and interesting links:
XenParavirtOps - Xen Wiki
Also seems that on xen.org there are sources for kernels with Xen bits already in (would mean adding in necessary NG bits, but the Xen bit would be done!)
Slightly off topic (well... quite a lot) - but I'm not aware of a quantity of a metric buttload - how does it compare to an imperial buttload?
Back on topic - what difficulties were there (I guess this is where Rob could probably answer)?
They are the same - but you can get fined off the EU for using metric. Apparently
Difficulties were between citrix xen and "hardcore xen" I think.
Running Citrix XenServer 5.5 here with Smoothwall installed for several months. Not using it in production yet (still testing!), but it's been working fine for us in the non-paravirtualised mode
tom_newton (26th November 2009)
I'm running the open source version of Xen that comes with CentOs 5.1, which is probably getting on a bit now. Hmm, I suppose I could try upgrading the version of CentOS used on the server?
The VM's config file configures networking in the following way:
Which seems standard enough - certainly when the VM starts up, a vifx.0 and vifx.1 get placed in xenbr0 and xenbr1 bridges respecitvly. Oddly, I've just noticed that the two ethernet ports that SmoothWall recognises seem to get enumerated differently every time the VM reboots - we're now up to ethI and ethJ. This means that, on reboot, SmoothWall looks for, say, ethF but doesn't find it because it's now called ethI. Anybody any idea why it does this, or seen anything similar happen?Code:vif = ['type=ioemu, bridge=xenbr0', 'type=ioemu, bridge=xenbr1']
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David Hicks
I used to have an issue on my old home file server whereby it would swap the network ports around on reboot (so my external IP would suddenly be on the internal card and vice versa). I can't remember fully, but I may have used udev to resolve - the dell article below seems to give some clues (page 3 has details about the udev line) - whether Smoothwall has udev or not I'm not sure (and I'm not sure how it may affect the machine). Can you specify mac address in the Xen machine config? Just a random wondering as to whether the mac address of the virtual nic is changing and causing issues.
http://www.dell.com/downloads/global...392-Domsch.pdf
Just had a quick look on our NG and there's no udev from what I can see... I'll see if there's anything obvious anywhere!
Cheers
It appears within your Smoothie, the area to dig through is /settings/ethernet/settings and /settings/ethernet/nics/settings-*. The nics/settings-* files seem to have MAC address assigned in there, so that may be somewhere to look.
dhicks (26th November 2009)
Thanks. I've been doing lots of Google searching today, trying to figure out what's going on. I found this:
Smoothwall - School Guardian Eval
Which came in handy. I've got to the stage where I can re-run setup and get the SmoothWall VM to connect to the network and act as a gateway, I've just got to get it to keep its settings when it reboots. I don't want to have to reconfigure its network from the console every time we switch the machine off.
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David Hicks
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