xVM Windows XP Hosts

I'm still playing around with xVM under build 76 of solaris though as I type build 77 is out to the general public.
I bought some more memory for my system to take it to 4GB to give me some head room to play with domUs, ZFS and SunRay only to find that my BIOS doesn't properly support 4GB. Currently the OS can only talk to 2900 or so MB - the rest has been appropriated by the BIOS. Now of course this being a 64bit OS the 32bit limitations don't apply - unfortunately the BIOS has no memory remap option for 64bit aware OSs I think the chipset does support it as far as I can tell but it looks like ASUS have not implemented it in the V3-P5945G BIOS - most annoying. I've ordered a new mainboard which should do the trick(at least if the BIOS manual I read is to be believed) When that turns up I will reinstall with build 77 - I'm hoping that my problems with biosdev might go away - but I'm not convinced.

Mainly I followed this guide for setting up my HVM domU but with a couple of bits and bobs I have gleaned from the very useful xvm-discuss@sun.com mailing list and the Release Notes have helped me get my XP domU up and running.

6612343
Setting:
set softcall_delay=0x100000
in /etc/system

and

root@frank / $ svccfg -s xvm/xend setprop config/default-nic="e1000g0"
root@frank / $ svcadm refresh xvm/xend
root@frank / $ svcadm restart xvm/xend

To confirm:

root@frank / $ svccfg -s xvm/xend listprop |grep default
config/default-nic astring e1000g0


to make sure it gets the correct network card (I now have two physical cards instead of two vlans to one card after working around my SunRay latency issue)

I also put this in my .hvm file to bridge the interface.

vif = ['mac=0:1b:21:4:b9:1, bridge=e1000g0']

Running the domain
root@frank xVM $ xm create windows-xVM.hmv

Then just vnc to the console, annoyingly Apples screen sharing vnc application doesn't work for connecting to the console session of a dom. Though this is almost definitely a limitation of the client not the server, as most other clients seem to work fine. On the Mac JollyFast VNC seems to be the best free client, vineViewer was a bit nicer but isn't free. vncviewer on Solaris works well as does xtightvncviewer on Ubuntu.

The install was not without some hitches - seemed to hang up and if I didn't have the vnc session open when it prompted for input the domain would get blocked, and I couldn't get back onto the vnc session. Installaition did take a while longer than expected as well.

I'm going to try and dig out some windows server disks at some point as well and give them a go to so I will try and monitor the performance more closely issues then.

permissions and gnome font cache

I managed somehow to break the permissions on /var/tmp on my OpenSolaris box.

I was messing with my users primary groups (and not paying enough attention or making
ing enough notes)

this causes a few issues for gnome and cde failsafe - ie you cant log in and non
root users couldn't even get a failsafe session.

I fixed that, ran gnome-cleanup and tried again cde and failsafe where ok for all
users but, still no gnome goodness
Why do I want gnome for my server? - because I'm thinking of putting a Sun Ray in
the front room - its nice to have google and wikipedia to settle arguments in the house.

Anyway - back to my gnome problem - logs is what I need.

I enabled logging for my user in my $HOME/.dtprofile by changing this line:
export dtstart_sessionlogfile="/dev/null"

to point to /tmp/mydtlog
don't forget to touch the file to create it.

tailing the file on login I was getting segfaults and coredumps when Xsession launched

after some googling, and then some opensolaris searching I eventually found this post

Which while not quite what I was experiencing made some sense to me I remember we had similar problems on our Sun Ray servers in the labs before thought that time Wilson fixed it! so I ran:

root@frank / $ find /usr/openwin/lib/X11/fonts -name fonts.cache-1 -exec {} \;
root@frank / $ fc-cache -s

Volia - all is well!

gnome is back for my user and it works for root correctly now as well