Hello:
I'm having issues with my CentOS 5.1/Xen installation. If I run the xen-bridge, I seem to get flaky ethernet. By flaky I mean everything seems fine from the host machine, but if I attempt to contact the host machine from another remote machine (eg. my laptop which is on the same subnet as the xen machine, separated by 10 ft of cable and a router) I either get extremely high ping times or Destination Host Unreachable. Ditto with ssh. I've disabled the firewall and it does not make a difference. If I stop the xen-bridge (/etc/xen/scripts/network-bridge stop) then I get what I would consider normal network access to the xen machine.
Hardware: Gigabyte GA-G33M-S2H MB (Realtek R8110SC onboard nic) OS: CentOS 5.1 64bit Xen
I installed CentOS last night with the Xen kernel, the stock kernel did not support my nic which I was aware of. So I downloaded the r1000 source rpm from the centos wiki, built and installed it. Once I did that the card was detected (an ifconfig would actually display eth0), but it would never get an IP address (the xen machine is configured for dhcp at the moment). Today, I installed the non-xen kernel, applied the non-xen r1000 kernel module and the onboard nic was found and working.
I then grabbed the updates from centos, saw that there were some kernel updates, applied the r1000 kernel modules again, restarted and (the non-xen kernel) eth0 was still happy. Good. Restarted again, but booted into the xen kernel, eth0 was still happy. eth0 would get an IP address, and was able to see the outside world. However, the outside world (eg. my laptop) could not see the xen machine or it could inconsistently. That is, ping times would be extremely high (on the order of 2+ seconds) or I would get Destination Host Unreachable errors. Trying to connect via ssh would also be sporadic.
Thinking it might be firewall related, I disabled the firewall. There was no change in behaviour. I then disabled the xen-bridge and was able to ping with reasonable numbers (<200ms) and connect via ssh. Just to note though, after I stopped the bridge I immediately tried to connect via ssh/ping and did not get through, so I ran service iptables stop (again) and then was able to get correct network access. I'm not sure if stopping iptables again did anything (I doubt) or I did not leave enough time from stopping the bridge to letting everything get reconfigured.
I'm not sure what the problem is or how exactly to troubleshoot it. The NIC is slightly different than the one specified in the CentOS wiki (the wiki mentions RTL8110 and RTL8169SC and mine is a RTL8110SC) but I'm not familiar enough with the devices to know how much of a big deal that is, if any. Also, just to be clear, the problem is other physical machines have a difficult time accessing the xen host pc when the xen-bridge is running. I have not gotten as far as creating a VM yet.
Any assistance would be great.
thanks
-- chris