Submitted by alvinstarr on Thu, 10/15/2009 - 08:15
We primarily are using convirt for our internal systems managment and cloudmin for systems facing the outside world. cloudmin's requirment for hard allocating vnc ports and setting passwords causes issues with convirt and vitrual-manager. The other systems do not expect passwords and hard coded vnc ports and have problems when they encounter systems configured this way. cloudmin conversly has problems when it encounters systems that have been configured by the other packages and has problems in the face of vnc port scrambling.
Both convirt and cloudmin are good products and they are aimed at different audiences It would be nice if they all played together well.
I will go back to sorting out my systems now.....
Status:
Closed (fixed)
Comments
Submitted by JamieCameron on Thu, 10/15/2009 - 11:37 Comment #1
Does it help if you configure Cloudmin to not setup VNC for virtual systems at all? This can be configured at Cloudmin Settings -> Module Config -> Xen settings -> Add VNC console to new Xen instances?.
Also, I'd be interested to hear more details on how Cloudmin's VNC port setup clashes with convirt. How do they set it up exactly?
Submitted by alvinstarr on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 12:14 Comment #2
I am not sure how convirt gleens its VNC information. There is no special VNC setup at all.
I have a feeling they are gleening it out of xenstore-ls I gleened the following from the net.
!/bin/shset -e domid=
xm domid "$1"
port=xenstore-read /local/domain/${domid}/console/vnc-port
vncviewer ::$portSubmitted by alvinstarr on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 12:16 Comment #3
Lets try again.
#!/bin/sh
set -e
domid=`xm domid "$1"`
port=`xenstore-read /local/domain/${domid}/console/vnc-port`
vncviewer ::$port
Submitted by JamieCameron on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 12:20 Comment #4
Ok .. so what happens if you try that command on a Xen instance created by Cloudmin?
On my test systems, it works fine .. the xenstore-read command correctly outputs the port set in the .cfg file.
Submitted by alvinstarr on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 12:40 Comment #5
cloudmins requirement for fixed VNC ports causes problems with systems that are created not using fixed ports.
convirt was happy reading the vnc port from the config file. It did have problems with the password requirement though.
I believe virt-manager also had issues with the password but I would have to rerun that test.
I also had problems where cloudmin allocated :2 and the system rebooted. The order of the systems coming up had :2 owned by another VM and then cloudmin could not access the original VM.
Submitted by JamieCameron on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 13:00 Comment #6
Ok, I see what you mean now ..
So what does convirt put in the .cfg file to have a dynamic VNC port generated?
Submitted by alvinstarr on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 14:14 Comment #7
here is an example. In short they do nothing.
# Automtically generated by ConVirt
name='imap'
uuid='f9af1a88-b462-455f-96d6-5bef5880af47'
maxmem=3000
memory=2048
vcpus=1
bootloader='/usr/bin/pygrub'
on_poweroff='destroy'
on_reboot='restart'
on_crash='restart'
vfb=['type=vnc,vncunused=1,keymap=en-us']
disk=['phy:/dev/VolGroup00/virt-imap,xvda,w']
#vif = [ "mac=00:16:3e:7d:6e:ab,bridge=xenbr0"]
vif=['mac=00:16:3e:7d:6e:ab,bridge=xenbr0', 'mac=00:16:3e:7d:61:ac,bridge=xenbr1']
STORAGE_STATS={'DISK_STATS': {'/dev/VolGroup00/virt-imap': {'DEV_TYPE': 'BLOCK', 'IS_LOCAL': True, 'DISK_SIZE': 85899345920, 'DISK_NAME': '/dev/VolGroup00/virt-imap'}}, 'LOCAL_ALLOCATION': 85899345920, 'SHARED_ALLOCATION': 0}
Submitted by JamieCameron on Thu, 10/22/2009 - 13:48 Comment #8
Oddly, on my systems the VNC port doesn't get dynamically assigned .. I can only read /local/domain/XX/console/vnc-port when it is set in the .cfg file.
Does convirt set some other global option to enable this dynamic port?
Submitted by alvinstarr on Thu, 10/22/2009 - 15:13 Comment #9
You have my config file.
vfb=['type=vnc,vncunused=1,keymap=en-us']
is all that gets put in the config.
The only other type of action was were the VNC port was related to the VM ID.
I have just shipped off my development system for repair so I don't have the ability to play with it much right now.
hopefully they will have it fixed before the 3'rd millennia
Submitted by JamieCameron on Thu, 10/22/2009 - 23:57 Comment #10
Ok, I see now .. it is the
vfb=['type=vnc,vncunused=1,keymap=en-us']
line that does it.I will have Cloudmin take dynamic ports into account in the next release, and allow its VNC feature to connect to them.
Submitted by Issues on Fri, 11/06/2009 - 03:36 Comment #11
Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.