11.1, Xen, Yast2 and Bridging Failed Setup

Anyone care to help me on this really big improvement of 11.1 release? I was using 11.0 in my remote servers running xen without much problem and now that my data center has upgraded to 11.1, I am forced to use 11.1.
Here’s what I have done:

  • Installation of the 11.1 went smoothly and uname -a showed the new kernel
  • Install xen by running yast2>Virtualization>Install Hypervisor and Tools

After it completes the installation, it starts to install network bridging and immediately disconnect the server from the internet. Attempt to reboot still fails to bring up the network.

Next, I reinstall again and then instead of using yast2, I used zypper to perform the xen installation without the network bridging and the system boot up nicely and uname -a showed the new kernel-xen.
Though without the bridging, xen is pretty much useless. SO I start yast2>Virtualization>Install Hypervisor and Tools and yast immediately ask to install bridging and again it stops as soon as it starts the bridging process.

Bridge-utils installed, firewall disable and apparmor disable and this is x64 version.

here’s the list of files in /etc/sysconfig/network:
config if-down.d ifcfg.template scripts
config.backup.by.convert_to_netconfig if-up.d ifroute-eth0
dhcp ifcfg-br0 ifroute-lo
dhcp.backup.by.convert_to_netconfig ifcfg-lo providers

In the previous version, you have ifcfg-eth0 and attempt to manually add this also failed to enable the network.

Has xen or bridge-utils being tested on 11.1 cause if it fails to pass yast2 installation, then 11.1 is just a broken upgrade to xen users and the next question will be, how do I downgrade remotely from 11.1 to 11.0 or can anyone pointed me to the right direction in setting up network bridging for 11.1? Its been 24 hours and running so many reinstallations of 11.1.

TIA to those that can help me on this and this is my 2nd months of using OpenSUSE/Xen and first Linux distro.

hmm no one with xen?

Best to try Bugzilla.

I’m boggling that your “Data Centre” would insist that you use an OS that was only released last Thursday.

Done any testing of the beta’s or RC in controlled conditions locally to see if it would work?

Yeah I came here looking for help myself. This is just great. It’s nice something as important as this got tested before the final release. Looks like I’m going back to 11.0

As mentioned above it is probably a good idea to enter a bug on this and see where that gets you.

However, in the meantime, why not setup the bridges yourself? You can do it all through YaST, and you have full control over your setup.

If you’re unsure about how to setup the bridge, do the following:

  1. Launch yast2 lan.
  2. On the Network Settings Overview tab, delete the existing configuration for your physical network card.
  3. Click Add, and choose Bridge as the Device Type. Click Next.
  4. Select one physical interface from the list of Bridged Devices, and configure the bridge in the same manner that you would have configured that physical device. Click Next.
  5. Repeat steps 2-4 for each physical interface that you want to configure a bridge for.
  6. Click OK to save the configuration and restart the networking.

Note that by going this route, you can do more advanced things such as bridges on bonded interfaces, etc. The concept is the same in each case.

Thanks for the advice guys. Problem resolved, I guess the main problem was lack of documentation when 11.1 was released, especially the xen 3.3.1 kernel which effectively took out xenbrX interface, pethX interface of your ethX from your configuration.

Also yast2 did not restart the network upon completion of reconfiguration of the bridges. Apparently you need to configure your gateway manually using yast2 AGAIN even though the network is up and running and connectable to the outside world. Somehow, during the installation process, the default gateway is not written back by yast2 until it is written the 2nd time. Make sure you go to yast2-network devices-network settings-routing and enter your gateway address before you start installing xen or else you will have your xen disconnected upon reboot.

If you have pre 11.1 xen config, make sure all references to xenbrX is replace with brX.

Now installing and testing of DRBD on two of 11.1 boxes with 2 Windows VM and Openfiler in each box is moving along fine and later to test heartbeat on the boxes for final setup opensuse/drbd/windows High Availability environment.

Also just ran in to this problem when I updated from 11.0 to 11.1. Took me a while to figure out that you needed to configure your br* devices manually with Yast, I could not find it documented anywhere.
Hope this is the last change to the Xen bridge setup for a while, in 10.3 it was xenbr*, in 11.0 it was eth*, and now we have br* …

Hi everyone, not sure if this is the best thread for searching for solutions to my problem - I have installed openSUSE 11.1 on an Intel 64bit machine and everything works fine but I’m having Xen problems, especially with the network.

Have been playing with Xen virtual machines, trying to create several virtual openSUSE 11.1 machines. I have created a paravirtualized virtual machine but cannot get it to have any network connection at all - no IP address is assigned by the DHCP server. I tried the suggestions in this thread and they didn’t help.

I’ve been tinkering with Linux for a while but this is my first step into virtualization so some of the terms are a bit strange. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Many thanks.

Thanks BigVBGuy’s, you are my hero. I have been sitting on this for 2 weeks now not knowing what to do. As a new person to linux and bridging, I’d like to add a couple of may be obvious things, but feel it should be said since I just figured put the pieces together right now and it worked.

  1. Using BigVBGuy’s advise, when you create your bridge adapter, the bridge adapter will replace the eth0 configuration. I don’t know why, or what the side effects are but I guess the bridge takes over the entire adapter.
  2. while configuring the bridge, if you are assigning your IP addresses (fixed IP and not DCHP) don’t forget to hit the Hostname/DNS tab and put in your DNS info. I also put in a hostname of suse111 and for domain name, someone suggested workgroup.
  3. don’t forget the Routing tab either to point to your gateway (router).
    So those are obvious I suppose, but rarely have I read anyone saying it out loud in a help document.

As for the xen vm part, once the networking bridge adapter is created, br0 was created. I checked this by typing ifconfig |more in a terminal window. I also ran ping yahoo.com just to make sure the linux side of things was working network wise.

Then, I created a NEW VM config based on a disk image I had already created with XP installed but had previously NO Internet working in that VM. During the re-creation of the VM config using the Create a Virtual Machine setup (xen tools), I went to edit the default network card realtek in my install, and I noticed that the br0 showed up under the network card Source. This now seemed logical, and indeed, the VM of XP finally got an IP address and now all is good with the world!

I hope this isn’t too long winded, but since I finally got mine working without reloading yet again opensuse 11.1, I thought I’d share the final pieces that put it all together for me.

I have the same problem and I am only able to get the bridge connections working on the XEN WM. I have a laptop and travel with it from place to place and need to have both my linux and my Windows (in Xen) to be working on the net. Here are the issues I have:

Issue #1 -------------------
br0 = wlan0 (got IP address via DHCP)
br1 = eth0 (can’t get IP address)

Tried to assign new essid to wlan0 in console so as not to mess up anything in yast2 lan, but I can’t assign WPA password in console. Any ideas?

Issue #2 -------------------
Xen (Windows XP) gets on Internet, Gateway + DNS servers are correct, but no br0/wlan0 connection. AND, most importantly, opensuse has no internet or local LAN connectivity.


The big question:

What can I do to make the network cards work for both my Xen VM and my OpenSUSE workstation without dedicating a network adapter solely to one or the other. I may sometimes have only ethernet, sometimes only wireless, depending on where I’m working that day.


Laptop: Dell XPS M1530
OS: OpenSUSE 11.1 x86 64
Xen VM: Windows XP x64 SP3
eth0: Marvell Tech Group Ltd 88E8040 PCI-E
wlan0: Intel Corp Pro/Wireless 4965 AGN

Can you get the wired network working correctly in both environments: XEN and the Linux side?
At one point, Linux couldn’t browse anything, but the XP could, and another time it was the oposit - linux side could but xp side could not.
I’d start by ripping out the network card configuration and try the steps I used first.
Once you have the wired working, then may be the wireless part will come next.
Let me know.