Comments on: Running a custom or distribution kernel on a VPS

By: gavingc

gavingc — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 02:49:29 +0000

MammonthVPS have adjusted their xen configuration so that the hacks in this post are no longer required for me.

From a fresh install this should work:

Nathan: the minimum steps from a fresh install seem to be; apt-get install grub-legacy ; mkdir /boot/grub ; grub-set-default default ; apt-get install linux-image-xen-686

My current config shows:
#cat /boot/grub/device.map
(hd0) /dev/xvda

#cat /etc/fstab
/dev/xvds none swap sw 0 0
/dev/xvda / ext3 noatime,nodiratime,errors=remount-ro 0 1

By: gavingc

gavingc — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 02:28:08 +0000

Thanks for the post Christiaan, I don’t have /etc/default/grub with grub-legacy installed but do on my laptop with grub2 installed.

By: Christiaan

Christiaan — Thu, 26 May 2011 17:02:49 +0000

With grub2 this doesn’t work.

When you uncomment #GRUB_TERMINAL=console in /etc/default/grub … run update-grub then aptitude could install the kernel-image without problems in my case.

By: Ian

Ian — Wed, 25 May 2011 16:57:29 +0000

For security purposes, I altered the mknod command to:

mknod -m 0660 /dev/xvda b 202 0

as it’s created with 0644 permissions otherwise.

Cheers for the post – I’ve just made these changes on my VPS to sort this problem out.

Ian

By: Szépe Viktor

Szépe Viktor — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 21:31:08 +0000

Success
mknod+device.map+echo

I only have xvda1 (no xvda) and it works.
Thank you very much!

By: 梦.:如此短暂

梦.:如此短暂 — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 08:27:52 +0000

A Bug of Grub-probe on Debian Xen VPS…

My VPS runs its own kernel with PvGrub enabled on the host machine. When apt-get upgrades the kernel package, grub-probe will throw an error message: grub-probe: error: Cannot find a GRUB drive for /dev/xvda1 And abort the upgrade procedure. This is du…

By: gavingc

gavingc — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:00:54 +0000

Thanks Nathan!
It would be wonderful if the default partition mapping is updated for the next Debian release. Having PvGrub available is a fantastic feature and greatly appreciated.

By: Nathan

Nathan — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 06:16:12 +0000

It seems to be even worse on Squeeze (Debian 6.0) – grub_probe is not sufficiently tricked by the presense of /dev/xvda , as it actually tries to read from the drive it seems. Here’s the steps I needed, in addition to yours:

echo ‘(hd1) /dev/xvda’ > /boot/grub/device.map
vim `which update-grub` # Find the following section, and edit as shown

find_device ()
{
if ! test -e ${device_map} ; then
echo quit | grub –batch –no-floppy –device-map=${device_map} > /dev/null
fi
#grub-probe –device-map=${device_map} -t device $1 2> /dev/null
echo /dev/xvda
}

update-grub 0
sed -i ‘s/xvda/xvda2/’ /boot/grub/menu.lst

I will definitely be looking into changing our default partition mapping in the future to keep grub happy.