How to mount Physical CDROM to a xen guest RHEL5.2-64

[Nuwan Alwis]

Hi Guys,
Need this big help. I have deployed a set of xen VMs on top of RHEL5 on set of HP blade servers.
currently i have 3 linux Para-Virtualized VMs on my hosts and now i need to attach the DVD-ROM which is accessible by the host through Virtual media applet to these VMs.

I have tried following

1)NFS on the /media folder with no_root_squash
Problem:i can access all the files and folders in the root of the CD but cant access the sub folders in the CD

2)xm block-attach command
Problem: Not that user friendly and some times it take some time to get activated.

Please provide me a solution to share my DVD-ROM attached to host, be usable with my VMs.

[Ivan Ferreira · Accepted solution]

>>> Problem:i can access all the files and folders in the root of the CD but cant access the sub folders in the CD

This should work, try with another directory as /media is used for automatically mounted devices by applications like GNOME. Mount and export the media on another directory at the NFS server, like /export/cdrom and mount in another directory, like /net/cdrom on the client.

[Nuwan Alwis]

Thanks Ivan,
Ill try what you suggested and get back to you.
also
Do you think that XEN bundled to RHEL5 is user friendly. because I'm totally unhappy about how it works.
one simple misconfig on VM makes them un-bootable and error messages dosent provide any help atall to non expert users.
any comments on this or any usable docs/tools other than official documents from red hat, make xen more usable.

Thanks...!

[Steven McCoy]

You might want to map the anonuid/anongid to root, just in case it's some sort of access/permissions issue:

/etc/exports:

/media/dvd 192.168.1.50(rw,no_root_squash,anonuid=0,anongid=0)

don't forget to 'exportfs -va' and unmount/remount the share.

[Nuwan Alwis]

Thanks Steven,
Will try this also.