mmacleod.ca

Category: Virtualization

Posts about virtualization and its many uses.

  • VDSL + MLPPP + FreeBSD + Xen = Awesome

    I signed up for the new 25Mbps VDSL services that are becoming available through TekSavvy, now that Bell has to provide speed matching profiles to other providers instead of just the staid old 5Mbps profiles they used to offer.

    The techs were done by the time I got home, but one of them was nice enough to install a proper POTS splitter for me, which was nice. According to the person present at the time, he said something to the effect of “I don’t know if I’m supposed to do this, but I think Mike will appreciate it”.

    My router is a Xen virtual machine, running a hardware virtualized FreeBSD instance, with three NICs passed to it using PCI passthrough. I use packet filter for the firewall and traffic shaping, and MPD5 to handle the actual MLPPP tunnel.

    Once I got home I connected the router to the cellpipe modem, and right away the PPPoE came up. Subsequent testing showed that I actually got slightly better performance by configuring mpd to bring up two full tunnels on the single line and then bond them together than I did by having mpd bring up just a single MLPPP enabled tunnel.

    Speedtest Result

    I had been concerned that the virtual machine wouldn’t be up to the task, but it appears that isn’t much of a concern. I haven’t done any testing with new MTU/MRU values yet, so there’s still a possibility of improving performance slightly from here, but I’m already getting pretty much what was promised, so I don’t know how much further it could go.

  • Ubuntu Natty Narwhal and Xen

    I was in the mood to refresh a few of my Xen virtual machines, and saw that Ubuntu 11.04 had been released, so I figured I’d give it a try. Ubuntu has typically been pretty decent under Xen, working well as either a hardware virtualized (HVM) or paravirtualized (PV) guest, but standards appear to have slipped with this latest release. I ran into problems with natty properly detecting and using both the NIC and the hard disk at multiple points in the install and setup. The instructions below will walk you through setting up a paravirtualized guest running Ubuntu 11.04. The instructions are pretty standard for any moderately recent release of Ubuntu or Debian, with the gotcha’s specific to Ubuntu 11.04 specifically marked.
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  • Installing trixbox As A Xen Virtual Machine

    My cordless phone are dying. For years now I’ve used a pair of GE cordless phones and a Linksys SPA2100 with the Primus TBB VoIP service. The batteries and LED screens on the phones are pretty well shot at this point, so I need a replacement. But why would I buy another set of analogue phones? That seems totally counter to my position as a VoIP tech. So here’s the plan: Get trixbox running as a paravirtualized Xen domU and configure a pair of Linksys WIP310’s to act as my house phones (the WIP310 is a wifi SIP phone in a candybar form factor, meaning they are essentially drop in replacements for my old cordless phones).
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