[CentOS] Backing Up A Xen Guest

[Graham Jenkins]

On Tue, 2007-03-27 at 08:48 +0800, John Summerfield wrote:
> Graham Jenkins wrote:
> > .. 
> > The strategy goes something like:
> > 
> >       * losetup -o 32256 /dev/loop0 /XenGuests/Guest1
> >       * mkfs -t ext3 /dev/loop0
> >       * mount -t ext3 /dev/loop0 /mnt
> >       * cd /mnt && tar xjpf /tmp/Guest1.tbz
> >       * for i in console null zero; do /sbin/MAKEDEV -d /mnt -x $i; done
> >       * cd /tmp; umount /srv/vm1; losetup -d /dev/loop0
> >       * xm create -c Guest1
> > 
> > And it always gets most of the way through .. then the guest dies.
> What does "most of the way through" mean?

Here's the last bit of what you see:
--
Loading ext3.ko module
Loading xenblk.ko module
Registering block device major 202
 xvda: xvda1 xvda2
Creating root device.
Mounting root filesystem.
mount: could not find filesystem '/dev/root'
Setting up other filesystems.
Setting up new root fs
setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or directory
no fstab.sys, mounting internal defaults
setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory
Switching to new root and running init.
unmounting old /dev
unmounting old /proc
unmounting old /sys
switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
--

> Do those files have partition tables?

Yes, you can do: fdisk /XenGuests/Guest1 .. just like a real disk. It
was created by using virt-install to build a dummy guest before making
the new filesystem.  Just two partitions .. / on ext3, and swap.

> Why not attach those volumes ro to another guest?

The theory here is that we should be able to recover an entire guest to
a new Xen host from a live tar backup done the previous night on another
night.  Or would could recover to a larger container file if we needed
more room, etc.  So recovering just part of a filesystem is useful, but
doesn't really achieve what we want.

I'm guessing that what we need to do is a 'chroot /mnt' then 'grub
--batch' somehow .. but grub doesn't want to know about disks with names
like /dev/xvda and partitions with names like /dev/xvda1 ?


-- 
 Graham Jenkins +61 3 9925 4909 
 Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing http://www.vpac.org/
 PO Box 201, Carlton South, Vic. 3053, Australia