I searched and tried many control panels.

Openqrm – I found this over kill
karesansui – This is very nice looking and polished but seemed quite slow.
VDS Manager – Still in beta for Xen

I’ve now decided to create the VM’s by hand. I then hope to make a PHP control panel of my own. Here are my steps for creating Xen VPS’s using the command line and Centos 5.

I’m going to create a vm called testvm

First I needed to find out what Volume groups exist on my system and what the VG Name was

lvdisplay

VG Name                VolGroup00

Create the disks for the VM and format

lvcreate -L8.5G -n testvm_rootimg VolGroup00
lvcreate -L 384M -n testvm_vmswap VolGroup00
mke2fs /dev/VolGroup00/testvm_rootimg
tune2fs -j /dev/VolGroup00/testvm_rootimg
mkswap /dev/VolGroup00/testvm_vmswap
mkdir /mnt/img
mkdir /mnt/vm

Now mount your disk image. I’ve created a custom hardened Centos distro, but you could use Jailtime Images

mount -o loop centos.5-3.64-smudge.img  /mnt/img
mount /dev/VolGroup00/looop_rootimg /mnt/vm

Copy the image onto your new partition

cp -a /mnt/img/* /mnt/vm/

Now all you need to do is configure the hostname, ip etc on the VM.

vi /mnt/vm/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=87.xxx.xxx.xxx
NETMASK=255.255.255.xxx
ONBOOT=yes

Change the hostname

vi /mnt/vm/etc/sysconfig/network

If your using Jailtime images people have advised to change this line to the following:

vi /mnt/vm/etc/inittab
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty console

vi /mnt/vm/etc/ssh/sshd_config
PermitRootLogin yes

vi /mnt/vm/etc/fstab

Add the line:

/dev/sda2     swap   swap     defaults     0     0

umount /mnt/img /mnt/vm

You will need a ram disk to boot from. This can be created by running:

mkinitrd /boot/xen-guest-initrd `uname -r` –with xenblk –with xennet –preload xenblk –preload xennet –omit-scsi-modules

Now all you need to do is create the config file and give it an IP/ Mac address.Please check which kernel you are using first and change – kernel = “/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-128.1.14.el5xen”…

kernel = “/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-128.1.14.el5xen”
ramdisk    = ‘/boot/xen-guest-initrd’
maxmem = 192
memory = 192
vcpus = 1
name = “testvm”
vif = [ 'ip=87.xxx.xxx.xxx,bridge=xenbr0, rate = 1000KB/s, mac=aa:00:23:b0:de:34' ]
serial     = ‘pty’
disk       = ['phy:/dev/VolGroup00/testvm_rootimg,sda1,w', 'phy:/dev/VolGroup00/testvm_vmswap,sda2,w']
root = ‘/dev/sda1 ro’
on_poweroff = ‘destroy’
on_reboot   = ‘restart’
on_crash    = ‘restart’

All is ready to go.

Just run:

xm create testvm

And you VPS should be now running:

check with
xm console testvm

Hope this helps.

Smudge IT will be lauching  a new site and Xen Vps systems soon. Watch this space..

wget -q -O – http://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/bootstrap.cgi | bash

yum install srvadmin-all

srvadmin-services.sh start.

If all goes fine, you should be able to view a web interface via port 1311.

https://localhost:1311

I then had to log in with my root user name and password. I was pleased with the amount of features incorporated in Open Manage.

To setup the alerts you can click on Alerts Management > Then on the individual sensor. I chose to select, Execute application, so that I can have the software email me a complete list of errors detected.

Here is the script I use to email me:

#!/bin/bash

ps -ef >/tmp/psout.txt 2>&1

omreport system alertlog > /tmp/alertmsg.txt 2>&1

mail -s “Server Alert” root </tmp/alertmsg.txt> /tmp/mailout.txt 2>&1

Obviously substitute root with your email. Now when the server detects, will receive a printout of processes running at the time of the incident and a copy of the log file.

I like to disable the folowing with the commands:

/sbin/chkconfig xfs off
/sbin/chkconfig isdn off
/sbin/chkconfig gpm off
/sbin/chkconfig pcmcia off
/sbin/chkconfig sendmail off
/sbin/chkconfig cups off
/sbin/chkconfig portmap off
/sbin/chkconfig nfslock off
/sbin/chkconfig netfs off
/sbin/chkconfig rpcgssd off
/sbin/chkconfig rpcidmapd off
/sbin/chkconfig autofs off
/sbin/chkconfig lm_sensors off