I am new to Centos, having chosen it because I want to set up some virtualised machines. I have Centos 5 running with XEN installed and I am trying to get some vitrual machines loaded.

I can only do paravirtualization.

The guests I would like to install are Ubuntu server and a windows XP.

I have source CDs for both but I get stuck loading them, the manual says:

Quote:

So I need to do the last sentence, but I don't know how to "loopback mount and extract the files" Can someone explain this to me please?

Best wishes

Adrian

Let us assume you have an ISO image, named phoo.iso, on disk that you wish to loop-mount so that you can access it's contents.

You basic command line (executed with root's powers) is:

mount -r -t iso9660 -o loop /path/to/phoo.iso /mnt

You will now be able to access the contents of the ISO image from the /mnt directory.

To unmount the image, it's a simpler command. Again with root's powers, execute:

umount /mnt

Note that there is no typo, above. It is umount -- there's no n.

Please have a look at the mount command's man page:

man mount

Thank you Alan

I'm having error messages with that, mostly "no such file or directory", however I can already read the contents of the cd. It has come up on /media/. If I do a mount command, one of the lines I get is:

/dev/hdc on /media/Ubuntu-Server 8.10 i386 type iso9660 (ro,noexec,nosuid,nodev,uid=500)

So it looks to me as though the system has automatically mounted it, but whether it is loop mounted or not I don't know. But I can copy the files to a local directory. So maybe I can do the first stage.

If so I now need to know how to: Quote:

I have turned nfs on in system admin services and it talks about configuration in /etc/exports file, but I don't know what to put in there, nor how to export the files into nfs. Help please.

Best wishes

Adrian

Adrian,

From the output of the mount command:


I can confirm that you actually have the physical disk mounted and so my guidance for loop-mounting an ISO image is unnecessary. The third sentence, of the instructions you originally quoted, can be ignored.

I am not the person to assist you with either NFS exports or xen guests, so please wait for another Community member to step in and assist . . .

Who's going to take this on, please? Can I bribe someone with a ?

I was under the impression that the VM management utilities offer the option to map iso-image into virtual (cdrom) disk device within the VM, or at least let one map the mounted cdrom to virtual disk within the VM. I.e. installation from CD should be possible.

'man exports' does have examples at the end, but I would rather try mapping the CD first.