When Liesl fell asleep after her morning exercises I got a little bit of a chance, maybe an hour, to play some Fable while Dominica was still working on her classword.  I tried going through the Arena but didn’t understand the directions and ended up accidentally dying just because I did the wrong thing and went through the wrong door.  Oops.  So I had to start over and ended up getting almost nowhere for my work today.

In the early afternoon, after finishing up her schoolwork for today, Dominica settled in to play some Paper Mario on the Wii Virtual Console.  She has been working hard the last few days to attempt to complete this classic adventure title.  This afternoon she managed to get in a few hours and was able to complete the next to last chapter in the game.

We downloaded Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars for the Wii Virtual Console today.  I have never actually played this classic SNES title before and Dominica has never even seen it.  I played it for maybe fifteen minutes, if that long, so that we could at least see what it looked like today.  Paper Mario is sometimes considered to be the spiritual successor to Super Mario RPG.  SMRPG was made by Squaresoft, however, and is far more similar to classic JRGP titles than the Paper Mario series is as they are adventure/JRPG crossovers made by Nintendo themselves.

I put in an hour or two working for the office today after getting paged out in the middle of the afternoon and subsequently needing to deal with several issues that all came up around about the same time.  I also put in an hour or two working on some other projects in the basement before returning to the upstairs to hang out with the family.

My big challenge for today continued to be attempting to install Windows 2003 (fully virtualized, of course) onto an HP Proliant DL385 G5 remotely onto a Xen Virtualization environment running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.  The challenge was that there was no local graphical environment at all.  I finally found a solution to the issue tonight by using SSH Port Forwarding to bring the remote graphical connection securing back to my laptop from which I am working and then connecting throught the tunnel using TightVNC because UltraVNC, for some reason, is not happy with the connection.  That little problem set me back a good day or two.  NTFS formatting is running as I write this.  Pheww.

Oreo was in a very playful mood tonight.  We played and played for quite a long time.  You can tell when he is really ready to play hard when he decides to dig out his tennis ball instead of just playing with one of his stuffed animals which he knows collectively as his binkies.  Playing with his tennis ball gives him much more of a workout.

Oreo was chasing his tennis ball at one point today and slid under the runner in the vestibule and fell twisting his front left leg.  He limped really badly for half an hour or so but appeared to make a complete recovery by this evening so I guess that it was not all that bad.  We will see how he is tomorrow after he sleeps on it and has a chance to become stiff.

Dominica spent the entire evening attempting to complete Paper Mario.  She picked it back up around eight in the evening and was still playing when I was wrapping up the SGL daily as it was coming up on midnight.  When I was attempting to get off to bed she had long ago completed all of the chapters of the game itself and was just down to the very final section in which she had to track down Bowser himself and defeat him.  I had wished that I could stay up and watch the very final ending of the game but the game really does not have any plot or storyline of which to speak so there really isn’t anything to miss out on.

Paper Mario, like all Mario games, is roughly the video game equivalent of playing a Popeye Cartoon.  Every single episode has the exact same plot and not just the same plot but the same plot with the same characters going through the same motions over and over again in a neverending cycle of dork like girl, girl likes dork, bully kidnaps girl, dork finds bizarre way of beating up bully and takes girl back.  Rinse.  Repeat.

It is almost midnight here.  I am taking Oreo and heading off to bed.  Liesl has been sleeping for many hours now and needs to wake up and get a bottle of formula before she and Dominica can really come to bed.  I have the Windows updates running on the Windows Server 2003 machine that I managed to get installed this evening.  I am very much relieved to have gotten that done and out of the way.  Today qualifies as a rather significant success with a lot of time being spent a) with my daughter during her happy time b) getting real work done for the office c) getting work done at home d) overcoming a major technical obstacle e) catching up on SGL completely f) getting to play Fable for at least an hour and finally g) heading off to bed early enough to be able to play at least twenty minutes of Dragon Quest IV.

Last night I completed chapter one in Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen.  The game is neat in that it is broken up into four chapters, each of which tells the story of a single hero.  In the fifth chapter, I am told, the four heros of the previous chapters come together.  It is a very interesting approach and so far I am enjoying the storytelling.  The graphical style of DQ4 on the Nintendo DS is extremely well done.  I am looking forward to more remakes using this game engine from Square Enix.

I like to start a Xen installation using the very handy virt-install command.  Virt-install, available by default, makes creating a new virtual machine very simple.  I will assume that you are familiar with this part of the process and already have Xen installed and working.  If you are not sure if your environment is set up properly, I suggest that you start by paravirtualizing a very simple, bare-bones Red Hat Linux server using the virt-install process to test out your setup before challenging yourself with a much more lengthy Windows install that has many potential pitfalls.

The first potential problem that many users face is a lack of support for full virtualization.  This is becoming less common of a problem as time goes on.  Full virtualization must be supported at the hardware level in both the processor and in the BIOS/firmware.  (I personally recommend the AMD Opteron platform for virtualization but be sure to get a processor revision, like Barcelona or later, that supports this.)

Using virt-install to kick off our install process is great but, most likely, you will do this and, if all goes well, you will begin to format your hard drive and then you will find that your Xen machine (xm) simply dies leaving you with nothing.  Do not be concerned.  This is a known issue that can be fixed with a simple tweak to the Xen configuration file.

CD Drive Configuration Issues

In some cases, you may have problems with your CD / DVD drive not being recognized correctly.  This can be fixed by adding a phy designation in the Xen configuration file to point to the CD-Rom drive.  This is only appropriate for people who are installing directly from CD or DVD.  Most people prefer to install from an ISO image.  Using an ISO does not have this problem.

In Red Hat, your Xen configuration files should be stored, by default, in /etc/xen.  Look in this directory and open the configuration file for the Windows Server 2003 virtual machine which you just created using virt-install.  There should be a “disk =” configuration line.  This line should contain, at a minimum, configuration details about your virtual hard drive and about the CD ROM device from which you will be installing.

The configuration for the CD ROM device should look something like:

disk = [ “file:/dev/to-w2k3-ww1,hda,w”, “,hdc:cdrom,r” ]

You should change this file to add in a phy section for the cdrom device to point the system to the correct hardware device.  On my machine the cdrom device is mapped to /dev/cdrom which makes this very simple.

disk = [ “tap:aio:/xen/to-w2k3-ww1,hda,w”, “phy:/dev/cdrom,hdc:cdrom,r” ]

Accessing the Xen Graphical Console Remotely via VNC

If you are like me you do not install anything unnecessary on your virtualization servers.  I find it very inappropriate for there to be any additional libraries, tools, utilities, packages, etc. located on the virtualization platform.  These are unnecessary and each one risks bloat and, worse yet, potential security holes.  Since all of the guest machines running on the host machine all all vulnerable to any security concerns on the host it is very important that the host be kept as secure and lean as possible.  To this end I have no graphical utilities of any kind available on the host (Dom0) environment.  Windows installations, however, generally require a graphical console in order to proceed.  This can cause any number of issues.

The simplest means of working around this problem is to use SSH forwarding to bring the remote frame buffer protocol (a.k.a. VNC or RFB) to your local workstation which, I will assume, has a graphical environment.  This solution is practical for almost any situation, is very secure, rather simple and is a good way to access emergency graphical consoles for any maintenance emergency.  Importantly, this solution works on Linux, Mac OSX, Windows or pretty much any operating system from which you may be working.

Before we begin attempting to open a connection we need to know on which port the VNC server is listening for connections on the Xen host (Dom0).  You can discover this, if you don’t know already from your settings, by running:

netstat -a | grep LISTEN | grep tcp

On Linux, Mac OSX or any UNIX or UNIX-like environment utilizing a command-line SSH client (OpenSSH on Windows, CygWin, etc. will also work on Windows in this way) we can easily establish a connection with a tunnel bring the VNC connection to our local machine.  Here is a sample command:

ssh -L 5900:localhost:5900 [email protected]

If you are a normal Windows desktop user you do not have a command-line integrated SSH option already installed.  I suggest PuTTY.  It is the best SSH client for Windows.  In PuTTY you simply enter the name or IP address of the server which is your Dom0 as usual.  Then, before opening the connection, you can go into the PuTTY configuration menu and under Connection -> SSH -> Tunnels you can specify the Source Port (5900, by default for VNC but check your particular machine) and the Destination (localhost:5900.)  Then, just open your SSH connection, log in as root and we are ready to connect with TightVNC Viewer to our remote, graphical console session.

If you are connecting on a UNIX platform, such as Linux, and have vncviewer installed then you can easily connect to your session using:

vncviewer localhost::5900

Notice that there are two colons between localhost and the port number.  If you only use one colon then vncviewer thinks that you are entering a display number rather than a port number.

If you are on Windows you can download the viewer from the TightVNC project, for free, without any need to install.  Just unzip the download and run TightVNC Viewer.  You will enter localhost::5900 and voila, you have remote, secure access to the graphical console of your Windows server running on Xen on Linux.