[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] Re: [Xen-users] Does XEN support crash carts?
Mark Williamson wrote: Awesome answers! The XEN community rocks! It now seems as if there is shred of truth to the 'myth'. Still, XEN already has almost everything anyone might want - so I'm thinking of ways I might contribute to fix what I'm thinking might be a *very* smallish XEN limitation. Please bear with me. I'll attempt to explain.OK, cool.Recall from the beginning of this thread that I mentioned that VNC is almost always good enough. I was bringing up the very rare 'crash cart' case. For instance, a NIC card might be down/dysfunctional. Even with a down NIC, the null modem (cross-over) cable to the physical serial port works (as explained - Dom0 mediates/relays the chosen DomU serial traffic, etc.). However ... unless I misunderstand something about VNC, VNC is *NOT* going to work with a down NIC. If I recall correctly, VNC requires a TCP/IP connection. Of course, I'm newbie ignorant of any special features tha might have been added to XvncD. Am I spouting nonsense here?No, you're not. However, if you install a VNC viewer on dom0 then you could fire it up on dom0's local console and get access to the domU framebuffer that way. You could also set up PPP to provide and route an alternate network path over a serial port. Me, I keep a spare USB/100baseT adapter around for just such moments to avoid being too off-line to get the drivers for a network card, or to help backup a machine due for hardware maintenance and unable to use the NIC for whatever reason. So, in the glorious ignorance of a newbie, I'm guessing that the physical VGA/USB ports are not 'active' (on the back of the box). Any attempt to cable up a crash cart LCD/monitor, keyboard and/or mouse, to these inactive physical ports, will not work. Right? Or did I miss something major?They'll work, you just can only get domain 0 talking to you. So you'll have dom0's VGA and USB connections; fire up the VNC viewer in dom0 and you'll be set. With what I described, the USB port can provide a normal network access without using the NIC. You'll have to reconfigure the DomU's to use it, but it's workable. _______________________________________________ Xen-users mailing list Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
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