teh fear

This may not apply to more recent versions of xen and centos, however, running kernel 2.6.18-xen_3.1.0 on CentOS 4.5 I have found that port redirection doesn’t work as expected.

when first booting xen most people like me (who like to ignore most ot the manual reading until later) will find a xen warning about the thread local storage libraries and how they access memory in a way that xen makes slow. The warning offers the following advice on how to disable it:
mv /lib/tls /lib/tls.disabled [...]

A file, key to the successful boot of many a linux system is the initrd image.
It used to be a simple gzipped loop filesystem, unpacked and mounted by commands similar to
gzip -dc initrd.img > initrd_unzipped.img
mount -o loop initrd_unzipped.img temp_dir
Then files can be tweaked inside ‘temp_dir’, the image is then updated by
umount temp_dir
gzip -9c initrd_unzipped.img > [...]

Having started to play with xen on linux, I have begun to use loop filesystems (a filesystem embedded in a file) rather a lot.
Xen virtual servers are, fairly often, run from within a loop filesystem and generally start with a fairly small file (1GB is big for a normal file, but not when it is [...]