[XEN VM IMG] ArchVM <--- deprecated 01/07/2014


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I don't need the actual local display, VNC would work fine.  I was just confused because the first part of the directions I was following for X was to configure drivers - and I don't have the VGA in the PV Arch to "drive".  I'll look for the vnc section - and will post back how I fare.

 

Thanks,

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So far so good.

From here

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Vnc

I installed tigervnc

My xstartup file has only the three lines it lists in the startup section, namely:

#!/bin/sh

export XKL_XMODMAP_DISABLE=1
exec startxfce4

 

I didn't mess with x0vncserver, since it's working without and I'm not real sure what that adds.

 

In the tips & tricks section, I copied that file, and edited the user to root per #2 in the file.

The thing that it doesn't say to do is:

systemctl enable /etc/systemd/system/vncserver@:1.service

 

Then I was getting a vnc session, but a black screen.  I found I didn't actually have xfce4.  So, a quick

pacman -Sy xfce4

later, everything is working fine. 

I may have run startxfce4 myself initially - I don't recall..

 

To connect - use your vncviewer of choice, and make sure and connect to :1  (for me, 192.168.10.29:1)

 

*EDIT*

It turns out, after trying this on another VM, that I had also installed xorg - without it, or at least some portion of it, there are no fonts to display in xfce and you get a bunch of squares.  I then had to delete /root/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-panel.xml to get it to regen the right layout of my menu.

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Hey Ironic.  Quick question.  I was looking for the syslong and learned about systemd's journal.  Did some more wiki crawling and ran across this https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/systemd#Journald_in_conjunction_with_syslog  I checked the status of syslog-ng and it says not-found.

 

Is that service not really needed?

Any reason not to enable it?

 

Mostly I'm just wondering how logging should be set up for easy diagnostics.  Does syslog-ng send all logs to the journal, even from packages that might be writing to their own logs?  Or just ones that are trying to write to the normal syslog?

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I am getting a ton of this message in my vm console when dl'ing from sabnzbd.

 

[23446.745986] xen_netfront: xennet: skb rides the rocket: 19 slots

 

I did a little research online and seems to be a bug that was resolved a few times, but keeps rearing its head. It only happens with certain configurations and certain programs.

 

Any idea what this is or steps I might try to avoid it.  It is very annoying to have these coming up while trying to use the VM.

 

Thanks!!

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I am getting a ton of this message in my vm console when dl'ing from sabnzbd.

 

[23446.745986] xen_netfront: xennet: skb rides the rocket: 19 slots

 

I did a little research online and seems to be a bug that was resolved a few times, but keeps rearing its head. It only happens with certain configurations and certain programs.

 

Any idea what this is or steps I might try to avoid it.  It is very annoying to have these coming up while trying to use the VM.

 

Thanks!!

 

If I'm completely honest with you, I get these messages too but don't have any clue how to solve your issue.

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I feel better now.  :)

 

I am wondering it you connect directly to the VM via Telnet or ssh, do you still see these messages? They may be sent only to the "console". I have noticed occasional messages on the unRaid console that I never saw in a telnet window.

 

BTW - I wanted to send a huge THANK YOU for your VM image, great directions and accompanying videos. I was able to follow them easily and get the VM running with Sabnzbd and Sickbeard with relative ease. This is simply an awesome piece of work that many many in the community will find invaluable as they transition to unRaid 6!

 

Five star rating!

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I am wondering it you connect directly to the VM via Telnet or ssh, do you still see these messages? They may be sent only to the "console". I have noticed occasional messages on the unRaid console that I never saw in a telnet window.

 

I saw them in my telnet sessions also.  I changed the way I was mounting the drives, and I don't recall seeing the messages since then, but I've made several changes, in an effort to resolve some niggling permissions issues, I can't say what exactly made the messages stop, sorry.

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I also get them all the time especially with transmission, or only with transmission since I'm hammering my server right now with Plex transcode/syncs to my tablet.  I'm not running any torrents, but the daemon is still up and I'm not seeing any rocket rides.

 

I remember seeing once that it was related to UDP buffer window but when i look now I can't find that, so I could be conflating two different error research efforts.

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Ok - I think I figured out something. (Excuse me if this is obvious)

 

xennetfront seems to refer to using xen (duh), and using the /net notation in front of the path (e.g., /net/Tower/mnt/...).

 

So it seems to be a result of using that syntax. I can confirm that the only times these messages are generated is when my VM is doing I/O with my unRAID array accessed through a user share using that /net syntax. I'll bet if we did a more conventional cifs mount these would go away.

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BTW - I wanted to send a huge THANK YOU for your VM image, great directions and accompanying videos. I was able to follow them easily and get the VM running with Sabnzbd and Sickbeard with relative ease. This is simply an awesome piece of work that many many in the community will find invaluable as they transition to unRaid 6!

 

Five star rating!

 

I would echo those sentiments.

 

Having been installing ArchLinux on my desktop machine over the last few days, I now know what a lot of work is involved in installing and configring the required packages for a usable ArchLinux system (albeit, I am setting up an X/Gnome system).  Ubuntu really does make installation a lot simpler, though ending up with a very much 'heavier' system.

 

We are all indebted to you, IB, even if (or especially if) we're not currently in a position to express our gratitude in a financial manner.

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BTW - I wanted to send a huge THANK YOU for your VM image, great directions and accompanying videos. I was able to follow them easily and get the VM running with Sabnzbd and Sickbeard with relative ease. This is simply an awesome piece of work that many many in the community will find invaluable as they transition to unRaid 6!

 

Five star rating!

 

I would echo those sentiments.

 

Having been installing ArchLinux on my desktop machine over the last few days, I now know what a lot of work is involved in installing and configring the required packages for a usable ArchLinux system (albeit, I am setting up an X/Gnome system).  Ubuntu really does make installation a lot simpler, though ending up with a very much 'heavier' system.

 

We are all indebted to you, IB, even if (or especially if) we're not currently in a position to express our gratitude in a financial manner.

 

Totally welcome guys. I was just in the right place at the right time in being able to get this released when I did. Glad it's working out alright for y'all. Donations have dried up recently but that's not why I did this. I did this because I could and it would help others.

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Update release

 

Hi everyone,

 

A new update is out. This is again a maintenance release with fully up to date packages as of today. There is no need for existing users to upgrade. With Arch being a 'rolling release' there is no major update every few months, so it is necessary to keep your system up to date at least every few weeks, that is the reason for this release. :)

 

Changes:

 

Rolled justinchase's changes into the example fstab entry for CIFS / SMB users.

Screenfetch ships with ArchVM now to reduce overall footprint by 65mb.

RootFS now around 700mb.

Python and archey3 removed out of the box.

 

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I'm really loving the documentation of this forum and videos so I would really like to give this a spin, unfortunately, the download link for the ArchVM is giving me a 403 forbidden message, is there another link or something that I'm missing? Thanks so much for what you've done

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I'm really loving the documentation of this forum and videos so I would really like to give this a spin, unfortunately, the download link for the ArchVM is giving me a 403 forbidden message, is there another link or something that I'm missing? Thanks so much for what you've done

 

Oops. My bad, a permissions issue. Now resolved on the host. Enjoy.

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Update release

 

Hi everyone,

 

A new update is out. This is again a maintenance release with fully up to date packages as of today. There is no need for existing users to upgrade. With Arch being a 'rolling release' there is no major update every few months, so it is necessary to keep your system up to date at least every few weeks, that is the reason for this release. :)

 

Changes:

 

Rolled justinchase's changes into the example fstab entry for CIFS / SMB users.

Screenfetch ships with ArchVM now to reduce overall footprint by 65mb.

RootFS now around 700mb.

Python and archey3 removed out of the box.

 

I am running the v4 image. Will I need to update to a new version periodically? Or can I perform an update to Arch directly to my image?

 

If I should migrate my VM every few releases, what is the update process? Would I need to reinstall and copy the ini files over?

 

Thanks!

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Ironic,  thank you for this pre-rolled image and guide.  It got me setup on unRAID 6 very quickly.  I've now got a VM setup with everything I need. 

 

How is it best to configure a static IP with the VM?  I currently have it configured via MAC address on my router but would rather do it on the VM itself.  I did some searching and it seems there are a number of utilities (netctl etc).  I presume this will also require me disabling the DHCP service?  I tried creating a profile and disabling DHCP but this left me with a VM that I couldn't SSH onto as the static IP profile didn't seem to enable.

 

A note for others, if like me you bugger this up then SSH to your Dom0 IP and use the command "xl console" to connect to the Xen domain :)

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Update release

 

Changes:

 

Rolled justinchase's changes into the example fstab entry for CIFS / SMB users.

 

I wish I could take credit for this, but it wasn't me that figured this out.  I believe this resolution came from fiscalcon, here...

 

Finally got cifs to mount on boot using an /etc/fstab entry. mount -a would work, but on boot it just wouldn't. No messages in /var/log/samba either.

 

The two more recent changes I made:

 

1.) Added x-systemd.automount to my line. (auto didn't work)

2.) Made change mentioned here by Tom a few posts down:

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=32682.0

 

My /etc/fstab line is below. I used the uid and gid of the sickbeard user during my previous attempts to even get this working on the command line with Sickbeard. Possible a subset of this entry could be used with everything working. I may look into that later.

 

//192.168.1.119/Media /mnt/unraid cifs rw,username=fiscalcon,password=<MyPass>,uid=998,gid=998,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777,x-systemd.automount 0 0

 

or, possibly from jumperalex, here...

 

Check out my fstab, I really think I have it licked.  If not, then I'll be curious to know what's different in yours that might be failing.

 

I rebooted the VM and the machine several times last night and every time my shares were automatically mounted when I either issued ls /mnt/[share mount] or most importantly, when I fired up Plex and started playing a video.  It just worked.

 

To be clear, before I added auto,x-systemd.automount I had to issue mount -a as well.

 

PS:

* I might not even need to explicitly issue "auto" but for now it is there.

 

* I'm also have no doubt this will NOT solve any race conditions with services trying to start before the network is even up.  But that should be solved by finding a way to delay those service (PeterB seemed to be onto something).  In the mean time this should make the shares successfully automount once the network IS up and running.  The thing to keep in mind is that df -h will not show them as mounted until they are accessed.

 

I used the example from jumperalex in my setup, and it seems to be working fine for me also.

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Ironic,  thank you for this pre-rolled image and guide.  It got me setup on unRAID 6 very quickly.  I've now got a VM setup with everything I need. 

 

How is it best to configure a static IP with the VM?  I currently have it configured via MAC address on my router but would rather do it on the VM itself.  I did some searching and it seems there are a number of utilities (netctl etc).  I presume this will also require me disabling the DHCP service?  I tried creating a profile and disabling DHCP but this left me with a VM that I couldn't SSH onto as the static IP profile didn't seem to enable.

 

A note for others, if like me you bugger this up then SSH to your Dom0 IP and use the command "xl console" to connect to the Xen domain :)

 

This says it far more eloquently than I can.

 

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Network_configuration#Static_IP_address

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Update release

 

Changes:

 

Rolled justinchase's changes into the example fstab entry for CIFS / SMB users.

 

I wish I could take credit for this, but it wasn't me that figured this out.  I believe this resolution came from fiscalcon, here...

 

Finally got cifs to mount on boot using an /etc/fstab entry. mount -a would work, but on boot it just wouldn't. No messages in /var/log/samba either.

 

The two more recent changes I made:

 

1.) Added x-systemd.automount to my line. (auto didn't work)

2.) Made change mentioned here by Tom a few posts down:

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=32682.0

 

My /etc/fstab line is below. I used the uid and gid of the sickbeard user during my previous attempts to even get this working on the command line with Sickbeard. Possible a subset of this entry could be used with everything working. I may look into that later.

 

//192.168.1.119/Media /mnt/unraid cifs rw,username=fiscalcon,password=<MyPass>,uid=998,gid=998,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777,x-systemd.automount 0 0

 

That's as maybe but you brought it to my attention!  8)

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either way, we're all working to the same end; a simple setup that works for everyone.

 

Thanks for all you do!

 

To that same end I'm working with lonix on integrating ArchVM into BUUX - I've just tried it out and even now I'm very impressed. Lots more to come on this topic.

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Has anyone had issues with Plex not playing nice with the array shares? I can point plex to my movie library, and it'll start scanning for a period of time until it eventually seems to lose it's connection to the shares and then starts deleting everything it's just scanned in.

 

I'm wondering if maybe this is a timeout issue with autofs? Just a guess...

 

And I don't know if it's related, but when I do manage to get the array to respond to plex and run a movie, I get the following prompts on console:

 

[  414.020623] xen_netfront: xennet: skb rides the rocket: 21 slots

[  414.021177] xen_netfront: xennet: skb rides the rocket: 19 slots

[  464.418772] xen_netfront: xennet: skb rides the rocket: 19 slots

[  506.667887] xen_netfront: xennet: skb rides the rocket: 21 slots

[  506.671802] xen_netfront: xennet: skb rides the rocket: 19 slots

 

Edit: Further investigation leads me to believe I'm getting packet loss across all my VM's (3 total). That can't be good... I'll try installing a different NIC and see if that helps.

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