On Jan 2nd, my server was compromised using a vulnerability in my cacti installation. This machine hosts all my files, my emails, my photo's, but also serves as mythbackend and asterisk voip server and therefore, I have to admit that I felt quite exposed after this event (although, to my best knowledge, no files were changed and only a spambot was listening).

I decided to upgrade my server and use Xen to logically separate the different functions from each other. I'm an enthusiastic Gentoo user for the last 4 years, so I used that distribution as a foundation.

One of the first challenges was to get the kernel to work with all the new hardware. When I first installed Xen, the latest version in portage was 3.0.2 with kernel 2.6.16.28. This kernel still had some issues with regards to the ATAPI support in libsata:


Feb 16 16:10:50 skadi kernel: ata5: translated ATA stat/err 0x51/54 to SCSI SK/ASC/ASCQ 0xb/00/00