Peter writes:

I still don’t really understand it. For example, why does the dom0
loose network connectivity when you add the physical interface through which it is connected to the network to a bridge? The bridge supposedly connects networks indiscriminately, and it is illogical that the connection goes away when you connect a network to it.

Well, yes, learning is one of the reasons for setting up what I’m still working on atm. The networking remains a black box, though. It now works the way I want it to, yet it is too complicated to understand without solid documentation. It’s not a matter of there being a learning curve but a matter of needing something to learn from because you can’t learn it out of thin air or by trial and error.

Is somewhere documented how to do that? At some point I understood that once the VM is somehow started, whatever it started from has become inaccessible from inside the VM. Since the CentOS installer features using something that is reachable through NFS or HTTP, I tried that, but since it was almost impossible to get network access from within a VM, that didn’t work so well.

That’s a result of reading documentation. The documentation isn’t clear about what to use how, and when virsh is mixed in because it finally allows you to run an installer within a VM, it’s even more confusing. Since the documentation randomly refers to various versions of xen and tells you to use xl in one case and xm in another, and perhaps virsh in yet another case, you can only try what the documentation says and see what happens. That’s why I said that the documentation is chaotic.

How do I switch to the new way without breaking things? I’m running everything on Debian now, and they’re using xm. CentOS does, too.

Someone new to xen and reading the documentation doesn’t know this, and the documentation confuses them. It tells them things that don’t work when they try them, preventing them from making any progress.

So you’re saying I can just stop xend? What about the settings in
/etc/xen/xend-config.sxp, where/how do I apply those?

Debian comes with xen 4.1, so I should be able to upgrade to using xl.