Off you go… into the purple yonder!

I’ve got a number of servers that run coreboot + Xen. I like to run coreboot with a linux-as-a-bootloader (LAB) payload. That means that coreboot, after bringing up the machine, boots into a small linux kernel + busybox environment, entirely contained in rom. That environment can serve as an emergency fallback to resolve booting problems [...]

Getting access to the serial port in a Xen 3.2 dom0 is somewhat complicated. This is the magic incantation for your grub menu.lst file to get console at 115200 bps on the first physical serial port, as well as on the screen.

serial –unit=0 –speed=115200
terminal –timeout=5 serial console

title Xen 3
root (hd0,0)
kernel [...]

So Xen 3.2.0 was released last week.
Oddly enough there are no precompiled 64-bit binaries anymore. That does not make much sense to me - running Xen on 32 bit is just… painful. Problems with accessing ram beyond 4GB, issues with libc6, etc. On 64 bit all that stuff just works.
Sadly, the 3.2 release is broken. [...]

This morning, a user on one of our machines (inadvertently) created a mail loop with a bad procmail script:
09:42:05 up 120 days, 9:23, 20 users, load average: 3367.40, 3265.08, 2751.75
I had seen machines go up to about 200 before, but never this high. If you ever wonder about the stability [...]