TonyBlog

I recently redid most of the software and a bit of the hardware of my network. The only sad part about this is that a windows box is now part of my network, A laser printer I have (Xerox Workcentre XD100) needs windows to work so I setup a print server on an old mini P3, couldn’t think of a better use for it.

First, IPv6.
My network now all has IPv6 access through 6to4 using 6to4.nro.net
Here is my IPv6 network startup script on my router

ip tunnel add tun6to4 mode sit ttl 64 remote any local 69.113.41.194
ip link set tun6to4 up
ip -6 addr add 2002:4571:29c2::1/16 dev tun6to4
ip -6 route add 2000::/3 via ::192.88.99.1 dev tun6to4 metric 1
ip -6 route add 2002:4571:29c2::/48 dev xenbr0
ip -6 route add 2002:4571:29c2:def::/64 dev eth2
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/autoconf
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/accept_ra
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/accept_redirects
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/forwarding
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/router_solicitations

It sets up my IPv6 subnet with the tun6to4 device, then it configures it to route IPv6 to xenbr0, which is my brouter (see later Xen section) and to eth2, which goes to a switch and runs the rest of my lan.
radvd, which allows for stateless autoconfiguration of devices (notably cooler than DHCP, though DHCPv6 is useful on some occasions), is configured to hand out slightly different addresses to my lan and to my Xen VMs.

interface xenbr0 {
AdvLinkMTU 1480;
AdvSendAdvert on;
prefix 2002:4571:29c2:abc::/64
{};
};
interface eth2 {
AdvLinkMTU 1480;
AdvSendAdvert on;
prefix 2002:4571:29c2:def::/64
{};
};

So now my lan gets addresses starting with 2002:4571:29c2:def::, and my Xen machines get addresses starting with 2002:4571:29c2:abc::

I’ve connected with IPv6 to freenode for a while (and my xen machines have unique RDNS so I have a nice tonyb@xen1.tonybox.net hostmask when I connect from my cluenet shell server), and it works quite well.

Now, onward to Xen.
I got bored with the old setup on my machines of Fedora 8 just sitting there, so I decided to install Debian (after trying out a few other distros) on it, and setting up Xen on it. I also upgraded its hardware to be a dual core Pentium D 3.2GHz with 2GB of ram, giving me lots of room to play with VMs (I have 5, with 4 usually running so far and they all run smoothly).

Vector:/etc/ipv6# xm list
Name ID Mem VCPUs State Time(s)
Domain-0 0 1126 2 r----- 8121.9
Vector-Xen0 1 128 1 -b---- 1075.8
Vector-Xen1 2 384 1 -b---- 1980.0
Vector-Xen2 7 256 1 -b---- 78.3
Vector-Xen4 8 128 1 -b---- 82.2

Xen0 is a web server, and an IRC server, Xen1 is a semi-public shell server (see http://cluenet.org/), Xen2 is an LTSP server for my lan, Xen3 was supposed to be an asterisk server but I haven’t gotten around to configuring it yet, and Xen4 is only there because scratchbox doesn’t work on 64bit systems correctly (nothing compiles right) and I didn’t want to mess up something that is useful. This blog is on Vector-Xen0!

The networking setup I have for Xen is kind of odd because every one of Xen’s standard network setups either didn’t allow the VMs to talk to the internet, talk to each other, or killed my lan boxes access to the internet. Eventually I settled for a ‘brouter’ setup as described here, and that has been working nicely, the Xen VMs all have static IPs of 10.98.98.(101+vm number). I dunno why I started with 10.98.98.101 for Xen0 but it works, the VMs can talk to eachother, my lan (192.168.2.1/24), and the internet, and also have IPv6 access.

Finally, printing.
I have a very old Xerox WorkCentre XD100 photocopier/printer, it works very well but it has no drivers for linux/unix and doesn’t even support postscript. The only way for me to print anything to it was to grab my dad’s windows work laptop and plug it into it. Eventually, I gave up trying to setup a linux print server for it and put windows on an old box I found (it had an OEM windows 2000 sticker on it so …). This still did not work because with windows print sharing, both the client and the server need drivers specific to that printer, the most I could print from my linux box was gibberish (and once it printed out the 30-something page source to a postscript test page and refused to stop). Using ghostscript, gsview, a tool called RedMon, I set up postscript emulation, and now I can print things again! Setting up CUPS to use a standard LPD network printer was easy once it was a generic postscript printer. If only ReactOS had some kind of printing/network printing support - I dislike having to use windows but at least its contained in a little box next to my printer with no screen and VNC the only way in. I really missed the ability to print things …

Blogging is fun! Last time I did this was summer!