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    MichaelCropper

    @MichaelCropper

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    Best posts made by MichaelCropper

    • RE: How Citrix dropped the ball on Xen ... according to Citrix

      Lot of assumptions in that The Register write up.

      Hobbyists not wanting to pay for licences, running on old hardware, supporting charities, etc. (Paraphrased)

      The reality is that any "hobbyist" playing with this kind of tech, it's really a hobbyist. I'm not sure I would class anyone playing with this kind of technology a hobbyist, this suggests a lack of professionalism towards these technologies.

      Let's be honest, 95% of people playing with this tech are going to be in some fairly high end jobs and/or high end IT consultancy. No-one has a hobby to use Type 1 Hypervisors, server grade hardware (brand new OR second hand) and commercial grade networking infrastructure required as a baseline to get this set up.

      Many people in the IT world have probably never even heard of the concept of a Type 1 Hypervisor, let alone want to get into this well-known "Hobby".

      The majority of the community contribute to progress their own understanding from a professional perspective and to pay it forward to support those who are chomping at their heels.

      The reality is that for most big corporate enterprise companies (Citrix and many others) is that they often go down the route of providing £x,xxx training courses to learn their tech and expecting organisations to pay for this. Many organisations don't invest heavily in their staff through corporate training programmes. So people are left to find these things out on their own time in many cases.

      No individual outside of the corporate working world is going to pay this level of investment for a course that, in my experience (not related to Citrix specifically), often provides little added value beyond a few Google searches, a ton of questions in the community and a watching a few YouTube videos.

      There is a big difference in a community of professionals and a community of hobbyists.

      If anything, that write up just shows how little they still understand about the community.

      posted in News
      M
      MichaelCropper
    • RE: How to Install XCP-ng Guest Tools to VM?

      Good old Windows automatic upgrade/reboot/annoying-as-hell-feature has kicked-in.

      I've just re-tested this since the above has happened (causing the endless disruptions across everything running on Windows). But anyhow.

      Seems to be magically fine now from an XO perspective (I've not done a single thing since this post VS this annoying auto Windows reboot/upgrade);

      3ee132d5-a048-4bdf-948d-03afdc2300d8-image.png

      No idea what this issue could have been caused by, highly likely a weird compatibility issue with a specific Google Chrome version is what I would come to the conclusion of.

      Seems like the age old solution in IT has worked again..... Turn it off and back on again 🙂

      I've had a few issues over recent years (other technology stacks, nothing related to XCP-ng stuff) where Google Chrome Version X,xx has broken something that should "just work", so I'd add this to the list of items that fall into that category based on this not working then magically working again after a forced reboot + general upgrade etc.

      It certainly does explain why I was confused along the way 😄 Anyhow looks like this is solved.

      What a weird issue, nothing related to XO in the end after all. The joys of working in IT/Technology/Software, so many layers inside and outside of control etc.

      posted in Xen Orchestra
      M
      MichaelCropper
    • RE: XOA Create VM and Delete VM Struggling..... Tasks Getting Stuck.....?

      @Greg_E Looks like I'm still on XOA 5 as I can see the "Try XOA 6" in the side menu.

      Just tried to create a VM via XCP-ng Centre, getting the same issues.

      Can't create or Delete VMs.

      I've SSH'd into the HostOS, and I can successfully ping the Storage Repository.

      Then just tried removing the existing Storage Repository where the ISOs are hosted, and it wouldn't disconnect, just hanging again.

      Tried to create a new Storage Repository (same as the old ones for the ISOs) and that wouldn't connect.

      Certainly feels like something SR related.

      Just noticed too that one of the backup jobs that sends the backups to a different SR on the same machine where the ISOs live also failed.

      Something has happened yesterday which is making the HostOS now no longer able to connect to the SR.

      I've just tried disabling Norton Firewall on the machine where the SR live, as that has got in the way historically, but that made no difference.

      Also just checked the Windows CIFS / SMB Settings and noticed that one of the three options was unchecked (previously all three where checked and I know that has not been disabled manually) - So will give a reboot a go to see if that solve things.

      Bit baffled what else to try to get the SR re-connected as literally nothing manually has changed, so it has to be some Windows or Norton janky auto update that has kicked in and screwed things up.

      Hmmm.....

      posted in Xen Orchestra
      M
      MichaelCropper

    Latest posts made by MichaelCropper

    • RE: Ubuntu 24.04 VMs not reporting IP addresses to XCP-NG 8.2.1

      Commenting for my future self and others as I just came across this issue too and it's not overly well documented and comments on the forums are often missing a a full story for how to debug and get this working......

      When using Ubuntu 24.04, the usual apt method of installing XE Guest Utilities via the command;

      apt-install xe-guest-utilities
      

      Works, but doesn't. It successfully brings through the Memory information through to XO/XOA/XCP-ng Server, but not the IP Address, which is a tad strange.

      When checking the version of xe-guest-utilities that is contained within the APT Repository that comes configured out of the box with Ubuntu 24.04 using the following command;

      apt info xe-guest-utilities
      

      You can see the response is that it is running version "7.20.2-0" (as at the time of writing, which is before running an apt update command.

      Even when after running an update command;

      sudo apt update
      

      Then checking what packages are available to be updated using the following command;

      apt list --upgradable
      

      xe-guest-utilities wasn't available for an update past this point unfortunately.

      So to uninstall xe-guest-utilities installed via APT, simply run the following command;

      sudo apt remove xe-guest-utilities
      

      Then install via XO/XOA/XCP-ng Guest-Tools.iso Mount + Command Line by following these steps. Firstly, Select the guest-utilities.iso from the Disk within the XO/XOA/XCP-ng Platform for the VM. Then SSH into the box/console view and run the following commands;

      sudo /dev/cdrom /mnt
      sudo bash /mnt/Linux/install.sh
      sudo umount /dev/cdrom
      

      What you will notice when you run the second command is that gets installed here is "xe-guest-utilities_7.30.0.12_amd64.deb" - So is further ahead.

      Then you'll need to use the following commands to start the service on boot and also start the service.

      systemctl enable xe-linux-distribution.service
      systemctl start xe-linux-distribution.service
      

      And that now results in the IP Address of the virtual machine flowing through to XO/XOA/XCP-ng, which ever you are using.

      posted in XCP-ng
      M
      MichaelCropper
    • RE: XOA Create VM and Delete VM Struggling..... Tasks Getting Stuck.....?

      @Greg_E Interesting, I've not had a play with RPUs yet, sounds pretty handy though.

      I can see how that could work when using Truenas as the HostOS on the Bare Metal, whereas I've got XCP-ng on the Bare Metal so I'd need to get some more machines to give that a go in due course.

      posted in Xen Orchestra
      M
      MichaelCropper
    • RE: XOA Create VM and Delete VM Struggling..... Tasks Getting Stuck.....?

      @Greg_E Looks like you were writing a reply as I was...

      But yeah, Truenas is on the roadmap at some point in the future, once I've had the time to dig into the details and understand where this fits in the overall system architecture.

      Out of interest though, where would you see Truenas fitting in with this setup outlined below?

      My initial thoughts are that Truenas in this context would be either;

      1. A glorified USB Stick storing ISOs
      2. A glorified (RAID Redundant) of an External HDD running as the Backup platform
      3. Or both of the above

      Have I understood that context correctly?

      Current setup is essentially.....

      • Bare Metal
        • HBA Raid Controllers for Storage
          • Primary Raid Array
          • Backup Raid Array
        • Dom0
          • XCP-ng Server
        • DomU
          • XOA VM
            • Backups; Primary Raid Array -> Backup Raid Array
            • Backups; Primary Raid Array -> Remote PC
            • Backups; Primary Raid Array -> Dom0
      • Remote PC
        • ISOs via SMB Share

      Truenas in the above context would simply be an additional backup to either;

      1. A Truenas VM on the Base Metal as a VM
      2. A physically separate Bare Metal running Truenas (aka. a glorified RAID'ed External USB Disk).

      Is that where you would see things fitting into the overall system architecture?

      Curious to get your thoughts on that.....

      posted in Xen Orchestra
      M
      MichaelCropper
    • RE: XOA Create VM and Delete VM Struggling..... Tasks Getting Stuck.....?

      Solved.....

      Turns out that everything above was basically a red herring.....

      After a lot of playing around with the carrot and stick, noticed a lot of Tasks in XOA just getting stuck at 0%, the kinds of Tasks that usually just appear and disappear in no-time, to the point that you just don't even notice they are happening really. Something just felt off.

      Multiple restarts of the following command when SSH'ing into the XCP-ng Server

      xe-toolstack-restart
      

      It cleared the Task list in XOA, but things just started to back up again with no obvious insights into what was really going on. I did notice the Progress % Bar wasn't showing up though, that was odd....

      Anyhow, after all this "fun" I decided to give the server a physical kick, aka. a Manual Hard Power-Off and Power-On.

      Low and behold, the age-old IT solution of turning it off and back on again has solved everything magically 🤣#FFS 🤦🤣

      Hopefully the above self-documenting debugging process helps future readers (myself included, more than likely)

      Anyhow, just a thought @olivierlambert @greg_e - I've clearly no idea what fell over under the hood here, you guys probably have much more of an insight into this than I do - So the question is.....

      1. What went on here? (gut feel)

      2. What insights could be surfaced to the user of XOA/XO to help debug these things?

      3. What friendly error messages could be added to help with #2 etc.

      Kind of rhetorical questions really, so just adding some thoughts for future product development.

      Personally, my gut feel here is that it's probably some low level Linux service/package/driver/etc. that fell over and didn't auto-recover - and XOA/XO had no way of detecting what had happened and hence was just a bit blind so seemed to go a bit wacky.

      If it helps to improve the platform, happy to have a private DM or in this thread re. any kinds of commands I can run on said server to see if it can help pinpoint what failed (if logs persisted after a hard reboot) - it'll mean more to you than me the outputs of said commands.

      posted in Xen Orchestra
      M
      MichaelCropper
    • RE: XOA Create VM and Delete VM Struggling..... Tasks Getting Stuck.....?

      SMB v2 + 3 are also turned on;

      Get-SmbServerConfiguration | Select EnableSMB2Protocol
      
      

      Which outputs

      EnableSMB2Protocol
      ------------------
                    True
      
      posted in Xen Orchestra
      M
      MichaelCropper
    • RE: XOA Create VM and Delete VM Struggling..... Tasks Getting Stuck.....?

      Bit more info.....

      The issue reading up on this appears to be related to SMB v1, which is commonly referred to as "Insecure" (More like Less Secure if we're being accurate.....)

      I've just run the following on the Windows machine where the SMB Shares live via Powershell (as an Admin)

      Get-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName SMB1Protocol
      

      Which has clarified that this is currently running, which throws a spanner in the works as I was expecting that to be Disabled, which would back up the theory in the previous comment.

      FeatureName      : SMB1Protocol
      DisplayName      : SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support
      Description      : Support for the SMB 1.0/CIFS file sharing protocol and the Computer Browser protocol.
      RestartRequired  : Possible
      State            : Enabled
      CustomProperties :
                         ServerComponent\Description : Support for the SMB 1.0/CIFS file sharing protocol and the Computer
                         Browser protocol.
                         ServerComponent\DisplayName : SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support
                         ServerComponent\Id : 487
                         ServerComponent\Type : Feature
                         ServerComponent\UniqueName : FS-SMB1
                         ServerComponent\Deploys\Update\Name : SMB1Protocol
      
      posted in Xen Orchestra
      M
      MichaelCropper
    • RE: XOA Create VM and Delete VM Struggling..... Tasks Getting Stuck.....?

      Various similar issues I've spotted on Reddit re. Windows updates breaking SMB Mounts over the last 12-18 months with updates. Impossible to track down the specifics so not even going to bother.

      Then found this issue too, https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/10545/long-delays-at-46-when-creating-or-starting-a-new-vm

      Which was solved by moving from SMB Mount to NFS Mount.

      That isn't going to work with my infrastructure setup as the Windows machine is on a Home Edition, and NFS is only supported on Business or Enterprise edition.

      As it stands right now, and given nothing I've tried to get the SMB Mount to work again, feels like I'm at a dead end to get this fixed. Looking like I'll need to re-address the architecture for storing the ISOs and one of the backup routes (thankfully there are many types of backups in place for redundancy)

      Not the end of the world, but a tad annoying which feels like it's probably a Windows update that broke this with one of the almost daily automated updates/shutdowns/restarts that kicks in. Only started happening yesterday, all previous backups via the SR were working fine until then. That's the only thing I can put this down to really.

      posted in Xen Orchestra
      M
      MichaelCropper
    • RE: XOA Create VM and Delete VM Struggling..... Tasks Getting Stuck.....?

      Northing weird getting blocked on XCP-ng firewall for outbound connections

      iptables -L
      Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)
      target     prot opt source               destination
      xapi_nbd_input_chain  tcp  --  anywhere             anywhere             tcp dpt:nbd
      ACCEPT     gre  --  anywhere             anywhere
      ACCEPT     tcp  --  anywhere             anywhere             tcp dpt:rtps-dd-mt
      RH-Firewall-1-INPUT  all  --  anywhere             anywhere
      ACCEPT     tcp  --  anywhere             anywhere             tcp dpt:rtps-dd-mt
      
      Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT)
      target     prot opt source               destination
      RH-Firewall-1-INPUT  all  --  anywhere             anywhere
      
      Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT)
      target     prot opt source               destination
      xapi_nbd_output_chain  tcp  --  anywhere             anywhere             tcp spt:nbd
      
      Chain RH-Firewall-1-INPUT (2 references)
      target     prot opt source               destination
      ACCEPT     all  --  anywhere             anywhere
      ACCEPT     icmp --  anywhere             anywhere             icmp any
      ACCEPT     udp  --  anywhere             anywhere             udp dpt:bootps
      ACCEPT     all  --  anywhere             anywhere             ctstate RELATED,ESTABLISHED
      ACCEPT     udp  --  anywhere             anywhere             ctstate NEW udp dpt:ha-cluster
      ACCEPT     tcp  --  anywhere             anywhere             ctstate NEW tcp dpt:ssh
      ACCEPT     tcp  --  anywhere             anywhere             ctstate NEW tcp dpt:http
      ACCEPT     tcp  --  anywhere             anywhere             ctstate NEW tcp dpt:https
      ACCEPT     tcp  --  anywhere             anywhere             tcp dpt:21064
      ACCEPT     udp  --  anywhere             anywhere             multiport dports hpoms-dps-lstn,netsupport
      REJECT     all  --  anywhere             anywhere             reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
      
      Chain xapi_nbd_input_chain (1 references)
      target     prot opt source               destination
      REJECT     all  --  anywhere             anywhere             reject-with icmp-port-unreachable
      
      Chain xapi_nbd_output_chain (1 references)
      target     prot opt source               destination
      REJECT     all  --  anywhere             anywhere             reject-with icmp-port-unreachable
      

      All the above is just out of the box default, no additional configurations.

      posted in Xen Orchestra
      M
      MichaelCropper
    • RE: XOA Create VM and Delete VM Struggling..... Tasks Getting Stuck.....?

      Hmm.....

      yum install -y nc
      
      nc -zv {IP of Windows Machine where SRs live} 445
      Ncat: Version 7.50 ( https://nmap.org/ncat )
      Ncat: Connected to {IP of Windows Machine where SRs live}:445.
      Ncat: 0 bytes sent, 0 bytes received in 0.01 seconds.
      
      

      Is that suggesting with 0 bytes sent that it's not getting out from XCP-ng? So never actually hitting the Windows machine where the SMB SR lives?

      What could be causing that?

      posted in Xen Orchestra
      M
      MichaelCropper
    • RE: XOA Create VM and Delete VM Struggling..... Tasks Getting Stuck.....?

      @Greg_E Looks like I'm still on XOA 5 as I can see the "Try XOA 6" in the side menu.

      Just tried to create a VM via XCP-ng Centre, getting the same issues.

      Can't create or Delete VMs.

      I've SSH'd into the HostOS, and I can successfully ping the Storage Repository.

      Then just tried removing the existing Storage Repository where the ISOs are hosted, and it wouldn't disconnect, just hanging again.

      Tried to create a new Storage Repository (same as the old ones for the ISOs) and that wouldn't connect.

      Certainly feels like something SR related.

      Just noticed too that one of the backup jobs that sends the backups to a different SR on the same machine where the ISOs live also failed.

      Something has happened yesterday which is making the HostOS now no longer able to connect to the SR.

      I've just tried disabling Norton Firewall on the machine where the SR live, as that has got in the way historically, but that made no difference.

      Also just checked the Windows CIFS / SMB Settings and noticed that one of the three options was unchecked (previously all three where checked and I know that has not been disabled manually) - So will give a reboot a go to see if that solve things.

      Bit baffled what else to try to get the SR re-connected as literally nothing manually has changed, so it has to be some Windows or Norton janky auto update that has kicked in and screwed things up.

      Hmmm.....

      posted in Xen Orchestra
      M
      MichaelCropper