Re: [Xen-API] Console Keyboard Input Issue with Xen API on Ubuntu 12.04

[William Baum <bill@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have now verified this issue exists in Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit and
32-bit, and Debian Wheezy 32-bit.  No keyboard input in XenCenter.

In Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit, I wasn't able to get networking to work in
(hvm?) guests at all.. I wasn't able to get a windows installer to
even boot without removing the virtual nic from the guest.  The
XenCenter console behavior was then the same as 64-bit: display and
mouse are fine, no keyboard.

In 32-bit wheezy there are additional problems with startup
dependencies causing hangups on boot, and subsequently requiring
manual restarts of xcp-xapi and networking.  Restarting xcp-xapi over
ssh causes network connectivity to be lost requiring a restart of
networking on the physical host.  I suspect issue is discussed
elsewhere..

I did attempt to get vnc access to an hvm guest by modifying
/usr/lib/xcp/lib/vncterm-wrapper as mentioned in several references on
the web..  This had no effect, as I discovered what was actually
listening on 127.0.0.1:5901 for a windows guest was qemu-dm.  I then
modified /usr/lib/xcp/lib/qemu-dm-wrapper replacing 127.0.0.1 with
0.0.0.0 as per:

http://cloudstack.org/forum/7-hypervisor-support/11767-xcp-console-proxy-issues.html

98a99,104
>       new_args=qemu_args
>       for index, arg in enumerate(new_args):
>               if arg=='127.0.0.1:1':
>                       new_args[index]='0.0.0.0:1'
>       qemu_args=new_args
>

This got qemu-dm listening on 0.0.0.0 rather than 127.0.0.1, and I was
able to get a working vnc connection to the guest, but only after
disconnecting XenCenter from the host.  This was obvious after the
fact, but I drove myself crazy trying several vnc viewers to no avail
until it occurred to me to disconnect XenCenter. qemu-dm seems to
allow only one vnc connection at a time.  This method allows any host
to connect to the guest with no authentication whatsoever, so is less
than ideal.

The better solution is to use an ssh tunnel, which I was able to do
with cygwin ssh:

C:\>ssh -L 5901:127.0.0.1:5901 root@xentmp

Then connect with any vnc viewer to localhost:1 or localhost::5901.
(I used vncviewer.exe from UltraVNC_1.0.9.6.1.bins_x64.zip on windows
7 64)

This method requires no modification to files on the host, additional
machines, or compromised security -- just an ssh client and vnc viewer
on the XenCenter workstation.

In my case I had only one guest running, so it was obvious which port
needed to be tunneled.  Otherwise, I'm not sure how to best determine
which guest is on which port.  This is a start:

/usr/lib/xcp/bin/list_domains| while read id x uuid x state ; do echo
$id $uuid `xenstore-read /local/domain/$id/name`,`xenstore-read
/local/domain/$id/console/vnc-port`; done 2>/dev/null

id uuid ,
0 3eea3001-1064-75af-b3cf-6850c6d99971 Domain-0,
10 832e5e76-6c8d-f4de-ee47-bbacf89f5203 Win08r2,5901

Now that I have a workable workaround to the keyboard issue, I'm
reinstalling Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit, which seems to have the fewest
issues..

--Bill

> On Wed, 22 Aug 2012, William Baum wrote:
>> Is this an issue with Ubuntu 12.04, or 64-bit, xcp-xapi itself, or ???
>> Is this behavior likely to be different if I install ubuntu 32-bit or
>> debian?

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