[Pkg-xen-devel] Bug#644125: Bug#644125: Bug#644125: xenstore-utils has completely inadequate description

[Ian Campbell]

On Wed, 2011-10-12 at 12:59 +1100, Craig Sanders wrote:
> I still can't tell whether xenstore-utils should be installed on the
> Dom0 or the DomU or both?  Both would be my guess.

They can be useful in either but in the common case you would only
want/need them in dom0, where they would typically be pulled in by the
relevant meta-packages. But...

> my current situation (and the reason why i care about the desc for
> this package) is that I inherited a Citrix Xen server (v5.0.0) with a
> bunch of debian etch & lenny VMs running on them.  I've upgraded a few
> to squeeze, but the xenserver host no longer knows what the guest's
> OS/version is (says something about guest utilities not installed).

(note: I haven't worked on the XenServer team for more than a year now,
but I hope the below is stil accurate/useful).

I suspect that XenServer v5.0.0 simply wasn't aware of Squeeze (I'm not
sure when Squeeze officially became supported by XenServer, I suspect
5.5.0 or 5.6.0).

IIRC the fact that XS 5.0.0 doesn't know about Squeeze (or any guest OS)
is mainly cosmetic in terms of the actual functionality, although it
will also presumably have a bearing on the support envelope on the XS
end.

> i've downloaded the latest citrix xe-guest-utilities that I could
> find (xe-guest-utilities_5.6.0-595_i386.deb) which seems to contain
> older versions of the same utils as xenstore-utils (but in /usr/bin
> rather than /usr/sbin) PLUS an init.d script and xe-linux-distribution,
> xe-daemon, xe-update-guest-attrs in /usr/sbin.
> 
> is there an equivalent to/replacement for those last 4 items in debian?

Those other bits are the XenServer specific tools, aka the "guest agent"
or "guest utilities" and are actually the meat of that package. They are
provided as part of XenServer and the main thing they provide is to
identify the guest OS to the host (I think they also provide some I/O
stats which end up in the pretty graphs in XenCenter if you use such a
thing). Did the new version work?

The guest agent is just a (bunch of) shell script(s) and uses the
xenstore client utilities to communicate back to the host which is why
they are bundled together with it.

The reason for the static binaries is such that they run on any distro
even those without a useful package of the xenstore utils (most distros
which even have such a package conflate it with all the host stuff too).
They really should be in /usr/lib/xe-mumble I suppose, or at least be a
separate package with a dependency which can also be satisfied by the
distro provided stuff in the case where the distro has a useful split in
the packaging like Debian does. I thought the dependencies were setup
that way but they appear not to be.

I'm afraid that for the most part this is stuff which you'll need to
take up with the XS support guys.

Ian.

-- 
Ian Campbell
Current Noise: Pelican - Red Ran Amber

Another dream that failed.  There's nothing sadder.
		-- Kirk, "This side of Paradise", stardate 3417.3