Regular Debian ISO does not work with XenServer which was a disappointment. From the Xenserver link I found the important thread

http://community.citrix.com/display/xs/Debian+Lenny

Took me a while to create the ISO that would work. I used jingo and a centos VPS to create it.

After this I created the VPS but ran into many problems. Especially with the OS not installing. It might be the local NFS server issue. I will have to check that later.

Turned out to be the NFS server issue (I ran the local NFS for thin provisioning which turned out to be a mistake).

During the install, I installed the desktop option.

Installing XenServer tools went without a hitch.

2 major issue after this.

First I wasn’t able to get remote ssh to work for some reason. You’d think being very famililar with centos would allow me some hints but no love.
This wasn’t a major issue as I could just use the console.
The fix was to edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config to allow ssh and to install ssh as its not installed by default (sudo apt-get install ssh).
Now I can ssh in.

Second issue was a real headache. Basically I wasn’t able to resolve anything. I was able to ping just IPs and not domain names. Because of this I couldn’t run any updates. I thought correctly that I need to edit resolv.conf but it still wasn’t working and after the reboot the config is wiped. I finally found the solution here (http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=41949). Way at the bottom it mentions dhcp service which rewrites the resolv.conf file. What I finally did was to remove all the symlinks to stop the dhcp service from starting (S24dhcdbd in /etc/rc.2 to rc.5). That finally fixed it. Also bind9 has to be installed (sudo apt-get install bind9)
Note: (vi /etc/network/interfaces) to configure IP.

Now I went ahead and started following the openflow instructions.

http://www.openflowswitch.org/wk/index.php/Debian_Install

Took forever to switch to debian unstable

One of the apt-get asks to mount the dvdrom but I wasn’t able to (VDI error). The only way to fix that error is for a reboot and I can’t do that so I added the universe repo.

sudo su -c ‘echo deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian lenny multiverse restricted universe >> /etc/apt/sources.list’

http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?threadID=252843&tstart=-1

Installing VNC

http://www.debian-resources.org/node/126

I already had xwindows installed during the install.

Install the VNC packages

apt-get install tightvncserver xtightvncviewer

(su – user) first or else the vnc will be created in root
after issue this command:

vncserver :1 -geometry 1024x768 -depth 16 -pixelformat rgb565

It’ll ask you for the VNC password. Now we’re ready to login (10.10.10.10:1). I use RealVNC

to kill a VNC session:

vncserver -kill :1

To decide on which desktop environment to use, edit the following file:
$HOME/.vnc/xstartup
and replace:
Minimal XWindos desktop
twm &
To use KDE:
startkde &
To use GNOME:
gnome-session &

Continuing the OPENFLOW STUFF

I use the Git method

sudo apt-get install git-core automake m4 pkg-config libtool
git clone git://openflowswitch.org/openflow.git
cd openflow
./boot.sh

Install your Debian Tools
Install them before the wireshark install (I had some issues compiling)

sudo apt-get install wireshark libgtk2.0-dev

This ask me for the Debian cdrom which I mounted using Xenserver. Took a while to install since it was 190megs. Not sure whats going on but its taking forever and uninstalling a ton of packages.

cd utilities/wireshark_dissectors/openflow
make
sudo make install

Skipped the regression update. Plus it killed my install and is unnecessary.

notes:
http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX120880

I need to build myself this..