v0.4.0 Release - https://github.com/acebmxer/install_xen_orchestra/releases
0.4.0 - 2026-08-23
Changed
The cloud image is staged on the pool master by default instead of being streamed. Staging is the only path that can resume a broken download, retry a transient failure, and check the downloaded size before anything reaches the VDI; streaming can do none of those, because a pipe already feeding a fixed-Content-Length PUT cannot be rewound. On a link that drops the occasional TLS record — which any multi-gigabyte transfer eventually meets — streaming failed every attempt while staging rode it out. Streaming is now what it should always have been: the fallback for a host without the few gigabytes of scratch space staging needs.
Fixed
A stalled streaming import no longer has to be interrupted by hand. When the download end died, the upload sat waiting for a response XAPI would never send. --speed-time could not help — by that point curl is waiting, not transferring, so the speed meter has stopped ticking and only --max-time 3600 would eventually fire. The two transfers now run as separate processes with the download's exit status watched, and the upload is killed the moment it fails.
A pool master short on scratch space no longer fails the whole deploy. The staged path signalled "no room" with a plain non-zero return, which under set -e took the script down before the fallback could be reached.
A failed cloud-image download no longer looks like a successful import. The streaming import piped one curl into another, and the remote shell reported only the upload side's exit status. A download that died partway — a transient SSL_read ... bad record mac on a 3 GB transfer is the usual cause — therefore produced a truncated disk that the deploy reported as imported, and a VM that booted into a corrupt filesystem. The pipeline now runs under bash -o pipefail.
A broken image download no longer hangs the deploy for an hour. When the download end died, the upload curl had already promised XAPI an exact Content-Length and sat waiting to send bytes that were never coming, with XAPI waiting alongside it until --max-time 3600 expired — the visible symptom being a XAPI task frozen at partial progress and a script that had to be interrupted. Both ends now abort after 60s below 1 KiB/s.
The staged image download resumes instead of starting over. It now uses -C - with --retry 5 --retry-delay 3 --retry-all-errors, so the transient TLS failures that a multi-gigabyte single-connection download eventually hits are ridden out rather than failing the deploy. The streaming path deliberately does not retry: curl re-issues from byte 0, and piped into a fixed-Content-Length PUT those bytes would be appended to the ones already sent, corrupting the image while appearing to succeed.
A short staged download is refused rather than imported. The file's size is now checked against the length the server advertised before anything is written into the VDI.
The staged download reports progress. It was silent for several minutes on the longest step of the deploy, which reads as a hang worth killing.
A failed deploy names the VM it left behind, with the xe vm-destroy command, instead of leaving a half-built VM to be rediscovered later in the pool's VM list. Nothing is destroyed automatically.
--update/--reconfigure/--rebuild no longer abort on a root install. Reading User= from a systemd unit that has no such line (which is what a root install looks like) failed the pipeline under set -o pipefail and took the script down before the fallback could run.
Deploy prompts validate values, not just their shape. 999.999.999.999 was accepted as an address and 70000 as a port; both were only rejected after the VM existed, by an unreachable guest or by the installer inside it.
Prompted settings are no longer lost when the base config omits the key. The generated xo-config.cfg was patched with sed, which silently does nothing for a key that is not there — so the VM installed on the default while the summary showed the value you typed. Missing keys are now appended.
An $EDITOR with arguments works. code --wait passed the availability check and then failed with "No such file", since the whole string was treated as one executable path.
Values edited into the config are validated. An unusable port or branch was silently ignored, leaving the summary showing one thing and the VM installing another.
Troubleshooting commands point at a key that still exists. The ssh -i lines printed on a failed install and on a non-200 health check named the temporary key, which the exit trap had already deleted.
A second VM with the same hostname no longer overwrites the first one's SSH key, which was the only way into that machine.
The disk-space check before staging an image on the pool master is derived from the image's actual size instead of a hard-coded 4 GiB, which rejected small images and let large ones fill /var/tmp mid-download.
tests/probe-xapi-deploy.sh acquires its XAPI session from the pool master, the way --deploy does, so a firewall that blocks port 443 from your workstation no longer skips the HTTP transport probes that matter. It also validates --host, --user, --sr, --image and --payload-mb before they reach a shell, drops the eval in the workstation-side transport, and exits non-zero when any probe failed rather than whenever one transport worked.
The menu example in the README and the layout comment above MENU_NAMES described the old fixed 5/4/centered grid; with ten items the menu draws five entries in each column.
Security
The cloud image is verified against its published checksum. The size check catches a download that was cut short; it cannot catch one that arrived complete from the wrong place, because a substituted image has a perfectly consistent Content-Length. The staged image is now checked against the SHA512SUMS its origin publishes beside it — which is what Debian ships — and a mismatch aborts before anything reaches the disk. An origin that publishes no sums warns and continues, so a custom XO_DEPLOY_IMAGE_URL keeps working. Set XO_DEPLOY_IMAGE_SHA512 to require a specific digest instead: that makes the check mandatory, aborting rather than continuing unverified, and refuses the streaming import outright because a pipe fed straight into the VDI leaves no file to hash. Fetching sums over the same connection as the image is not a detached signature — it defends against a bad mirror or a stale cache, not an attacker holding the TLS session for both requests.
A pinned pool-master fingerprint is now enforced instead of advised. deploy_verify_host_key fingerprinted the host key and then returned success on every path that could not complete the check — so with XO_DEPLOY_POOL_FINGERPRINT set, a ssh-keyscan that timed out meant the host password was sent to whatever answered on that address, which is exactly what pinning exists to prevent and the easiest outcome for an on-path attacker to arrange. A pin that cannot be checked is now a hard failure.
The verified host key is bound to the connection that carries the password. The scanned key was fingerprinted, shown, and then discarded, while dom0_exec connected with StrictHostKeyChecking=accept-new against the default known_hosts — verifying one transaction and trusting another. Nothing stopped a different key, or the host's RSA key when the ED25519 one had been displayed, being accepted at connect time. The whole scan is now pinned into a run-scoped known_hosts that dom0_exec enforces with StrictHostKeyChecking=yes, the same way deploy_wait_for_guest already treated the guest.
A hostile pool master can no longer run commands on the workstation. The free-space probe in deploy_import_vdi_staged fed the host's reply straight into (( )), which expands an array subscript before evaluating it — so an answer of PATH[$(...)] executed locally rather than being rejected. It is now checked against ^[0-9]+$ first, matching the guards already applied to size and got in the same function. Note that set -euo pipefail does not cover this: set -u blocks only the unbound-variable form of the payload. This mattered more after staging became the default import path, because the probe went from rarely reached to running on every deploy.
The pool master's root password is no longer visible in ps. Three calls predating dom0_exec still used sshpass -p "$HOST_PASSWORD", putting the password in the process list where any other user on the workstation could read it. They now use sshpass -e with $SSHPASS, as dom0_exec does.
The admin password hash is kept out of XO_DEBUG=1 output. deploy_harden_guest_sudo and deploy_build_config_drive were missing the local - / set +x guard the rest of the script uses, so the hash was printed by xtrace. Previously masked on automated runs only because --non-interactive left the hash empty; requiring a password made it reachable on every deploy.
Revoking the deployment key can no longer empty authorized_keys. A grep failure — no space for the temporary file, an unreadable source — was swallowed by || true and the empty result written back, taking the operator's own key with it. grep's "nothing matched" (a legitimate empty result) is now distinguished from a real error, which aborts and leaves the file untouched.
The streaming import's FIFO is created inside a private directory. mktemp -u returns a name without creating anything, leaving a window in dom0's world-writable /tmp. The FIFO now lives in a mktemp -d directory.
DSA public keys are rejected. ssh-dss was accepted by deploy_load_pubkey, but OpenSSH has refused DSA since 7.0 and removed it in 9.8, so it only installed a key that silently never worked.
The cloud-init cache scrub covers cloud-config.txt. The rendered config holds hashed_passwd just as the raw user-data does; only the latter was being redacted.
The deployment SSH key is destroyed at the end of a deploy. It used to be...
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