interesting

So a year ago, the company I work for moved. One of the thing that needed to be done was readdressing our Citrix XenServers. I was busy working on Layer2/3 switch problems, so someone else did the address change. Unfortunately one of them didn't work right after. The address was changed (by following Citrix's documentation). However networking and XAPI would fail to start. Networking had to be started by hand. (By the way, you have to bring up both the physical and xenbr interfaces for it to work).

This week I'm looking at erroneous traffic on the network. One of the things I noticed was the bad XenServer trying connect via port 443 to an old ip address.

Looking at it, /etc/xensource/pool.conf had the old address in it. So I commented it out. Then rebooted. Brought the network up by hand, and decided to try and figure out what the deal was.

Googling around, I found information to try using the xe commands to make network configuration changes. Problem is, you need xapi running for xe to work. restarting XAPI doesn't give the world's greatest error message in /var/log/messages. Exit status 2. Watching from the CLI, the error was xapi failed to start.

Someone else on the Citrix Forum said that they recreated the files in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts. So I copied those files from a working box, and changed what I needed too.

Still not going.

Hunting around, I found /opt/xensource/xapi, which I think is what "service xapi restart / xe-toolstack-restart" are trying to run. I tried to start that. Got the following error: xenserver exception Failure("cannot parse pool_role from pool config file")

Google was next to useless trying to find information on that. So I fired up find on the box and tried to find anything with the filename pool (based off what little information Google did give me).

The /etc/xensource/pool.conf came back up. So I went back into the file I changed last night, took out the comment character(#) and figured for grins to change the line to read slave:.

Restarted xapi and it worked.

Rebooted and the box came up right, everything working.

Long way of saying: if you're running Citrix XenServer in a pool, have to re-address and things brake, check the pool.conf file.

Interesting what happens when you're trying to fix one problem and in the process end up solving another.