n my previous post I explained how I set up my new server as a Xen server in order to maximize my flexibility. It's been little over a week now and I am saddened to say that Xen has gone out the Window. While I love the flexibility, it's just not ready for me yet.

Snag 1: Running NFS

I hit the first snag shortly after finishing up my previous article. I created a new guest system (also Debian/etch of course) to run as an NFS file server. It worked great until I tried coping my music collection from my old server to my new server. At several points during the transfer my entire server would crash—badly. Not just the guest system, but the entire dom0 would freeze up, spit all kind of nastiness at me in the console and then automagically reboot the entire system. After the reboot, no messages were logged in /var/log/messages or other OS/kernel logs. All logs would jump from "everything fine" to the boot messages.

I never managed to quite figure out what caused this but the crash happened every time I tried to upload a significant amount of data to the guest NFS server. At one point I luckily saw it happening at the console and I spotted a kernel oops, but I was unable to log it. Since I was using the nfs-kernel-server package I figured that kernel modules may not play too nicely with Xen so I switched to unfs3, the userspace NFS server instead. That seems to hold together nicely.

Snag 2: Printing

Full Story.