wiredfool

It took a little bit of futzing to get UML working on Debian Stable hosting a newly installed Debian Stable image.

• The usermode tools and kernel image installed with debian stable are very out of date. You will need to update them.
• You need a relatively new uml kernel. I used this non modularized kernel
• I made an updated .deb package of the 09/03/2003 version of the utitilities and installed them.
• I wound up installing a new host kernel using devfs. I’m not sure if this made the difference, but since I needed to install it anyway for the latest security patch.
• I needed to fix the alias at /dev/net/tun to point to /dev/misc/net/tun rather than just misc/net/tun. I also needed to give the uml host user rw access on it.
• I wound up using xterms as the console.
• The startup command line I’m using is ./linux ubd0=server1 con=xterm con0=fd:0,fd:1 eth0=tuntap,tap0,,192.168.20.1
• When setting up the network connection with presetup TUN/TAP devices, you need to make sure that the device name is in the second field.
• When setting up firewall rules for your new virtual machine, don’t forget that you need to both enable forwarding and masquerade.
• If you install a debian system image using debootstrap, the second (normally after reboot) stage is /usr/sbin/base-config

Other Useful Links:

• http://trilldev.sourceforge.net/files/remotedeb.html
• Notes on creating a woody filesystem image
• http://uml.openconsultancy.com/

And a not related useful link: on netdev watchdog timeouts Update, didn’t help. Leading candidate now is some sort of apic bug or cheap network cards, since I have an old AMD/via system and um… cheap network cards. I may just write a script to down/up the interface when I see the note in the kernel log.