Building Xen 4.4.1 on NetRunner Rolling (Manjaro)

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This is a post I've had in draft as I progressed through setting hop Xen in Netrunner. I managed to get it all built and running but at the end ran into a network issue in VMs that I didn't have time to solve. I'm publishing anyway for future reference and maybe it will be useful to someone. I'll update or link through to any follow-ups I do.
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MediaServer8 has been offline for about a week now as I work on something of a radical shift: a long-term stalwart of the set up is under consideration for the chop. unRAID might go.

My whole-house integrated media server has been based on unRAID for some time now, with version 6 (still in beta) providing a virtualisation platform on which I've built a TV Server and several virtual HTPCs with passthrough GPUs.

This is a great setup as it consolidates multiple machines into one, reducing running costs and space usage while in theory being easy to maintain.

A Few Upgrades

A few updates to MediaServer8 this weekend. I replaced my 250GB cache drive with a Crucial Crucial 240GB M500 SATA 6Gb/s 2.5 Inch Internal Solid State Drive. My unRAID cache houses mainly Xen VMs and these have become noticeably faster to boot and peppier overall. On some internal transfers from unRAID to the drive, I see speeds of 150 Mb/s which is a big improvement on the spinner previously doing cache duties.

I also added an extra DVB S2 dual tuner to the system meaning I now have 6x tuners (4x DVD S2, 2x DVB-T) which is more than enough to service current live TV and PVR requirements.

6x Tuners in ArgusTV running in Windows 7 VM on MediaServer 8

Also, my X10 CM15A USB interface arrived so I can now control various lights and appliances around the house from a VM. My Christmas project is to set up a web server and application  to allow lighting and whole house audio control from tablet and laptop clients.

HTPC as PreProcessor

I’ve been living with my old school (analog) Pioneer VSX-D2011 receiver for well over 10 years now. It’s 7x100W channels have served me well in my HT but it’s very old in terms of format support, connectivity etc.

This hasn’t bothered me too much as I’ve always had a HTPC to look after playback etc. but it’s always been a stop-gap solution as I think about a receiver upgrade or something else.

Now, I’m hankering after a speaker upgrade and whatever I go for will likely need more power than a 7-channel receiver can provide, so I’m thinking separates. That being the case, I need to purchase a stand-alone AV processor or seriously look at using the HTPC as processor.

I decided to look at the HTPC as it would require the least up-front investment and I can determine if it all works with current equipment b before investing in speakers & amps.

Registering Xen VM with UnRaid

Each time I create a new VM in Xen on UnRaid, I can never recall the command to register it so that it shows up in the Xen management interface.

Thanks to a discussion on the UnRaid forums, I've now found it again and am posting here for posterity;

xenman register /mnt/cache/domains/vmfolder/vmname.cfg

System Transplant

For a few reasons, I wanted to move away from my tower-based media server;

First, I wanted to move the server from my attic to a rack as I'm soon going to be adding a new wider screen to my home theatre and this will make attic access a little more difficult than at present.

Second, with hard drive capacity increasing rapidly, I really don't see a use for oodles of drives in a system - all I need to do is gradually replace my 1TB drives with 4TBs and I'll have move from 12TB TO 27TB, 37TB if I go with 6TB drives. So I really don't need any more space.

Given the above and my recent addition of an expansion chassis, I settled on 2x SilverStone cases; an SST-GD07B for MediaServer8 itself and a Grandia GD09 for the expansion chassis.

Before transplant - the recipient is a good deal smaller than the donor

Rsync + Screen

More on copying, this time on the linux common line.I'm in the process of removing some smaller drives from my unRAID array and converting the remaining drives to XFS. To do this requires a good deal of data shuffling.

It's best to do this directly on the unRAID OS so as to remove any network operations. I'd never liked using Midnight Commander so decided a cp operation was required. However, two problems; cp doesn't show progress and doing this over ssh is risky as if the connection or client system dies, the copy operation dies.