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Date: Wed, 05 Dec 2007 12:04:55 +0530
From: Sadique Puthen <sputhenp@redhat.com>
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To: Steven <xen@savetimehosting.com>
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Subject: Re: [Xen-users] what the H is this virbr0?
Cc: xen-users <xen-users@lists.xensource.com>
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Steven wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I just tested in the lab the new CentOS 5.1 Xen and find out it breaks 
> network connectivity, at least in my setup.
> It seems it is somehow making use of the 3.1 Xen version (altought I 
> am not sure about that) but whatever changes it introduce is not 
> documented at the location one would expect, the obvious new thing (at 
> least for me) is this thing I will call out of guessing a virtual 
> bridge, when I do an ifconfig on the dom0:
>
> virbr0    Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr FE:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF
>          inet addr:192.168.122.1  Bcast:192.168.122.255
> This seems to change everything with regard to networking. I googgled 
> a bit and read the following links but I could not find any 
> explanation about what it is, what it does and why it breaks my setup:

Centos 5.1 makes networking for guests a bit easier by adding virb0 and 
implementing a natted network connection for guests. This shouldn't 
break the networking that you had previously in Centos-5.0. At least it 
has not broken anything on my RHEL5 system when I upgraded that to RHEL-5.1

RHEL-5.1 makes it possible for you to put guests in a private network 
behind dom0 and nat packets to your LAN through dom0. This is the 
preferred set up for laptops. If you create guests using virt-manager, 
it defaults the network setup to use natting, unless you explicitly 
select to bridge the network to xenbrx. The problem is that RHEL-5.1 
does not enable ip forwarding by default in the kernel. So if you create 
guests and bridge them to virbr0, the guest wouldn't be able to 
communicate to the external networks. This can simply be solved by 
enabling ip forwarding in Dom0.

--Sadique

>
> http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenNetworking
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/xen/readmes/user/user.html#SECTION03220000000000000000 
>
>
> Can anyone point to an official information source for this beast?
>
> Regards,
>


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