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IPFire as Xen (4.1) DomU
Introduction
The following procedure is inspired by this article on the IPFire Wiki, this article being a summary of the previous one as well as this article on the Panticz web site.
The directories locations that are used in this example are based on this wiki's Sample Configuration, but YMMV.
You should also read the README file, inside the ipfire/ directory that's extracted from the archive.
In case you didn't do so already, it is also recommended that you get at least the base concepts that IPFire relies on by ready through their website, you should, at the minimum, grasp the "colored" concept of the IPFire firewalling.
Also read this IPFire article to understand why it's recommended to install IPFire as a HVM.
Network
Setting up a firewall implies having at least 2 physical NICs on the host machine.
Using the scon Image of IPFire
Get the IPFire image
Getting to the IPFire download page didn't provide us the link to the latest “scon” release… Let's have a look at the IPFire torrent tracker: BINGO ! we have a torrent for ipfire-2.17.1gb-ext4-scon.i586-full-core87.img.gz
Now use your favorite torrent app to download to the compressed image to your workstation, and transfer the image on your Xen Host.
> cd /directory/of/image/dowload/ > sftp root@<your_xen_host_ip> sftp> cd /opt/xen/X-Local-ISO sftp> put ipfire-2.17.1gb-ext4-scon.i586-full-core87.img.gz
Create the IPFire Virtual Hard Disk
Follow the procedure described in this wiki to create a dedicated VDI for the IPFire VM. But DO NOT PLUG THE VBD YET, as we'll first copy the IPFire image disk to it.
Copy the IPFire image to the vhd file
The IPFire image contains the partitions that are needed by the IPFire VM we intend to create, you could verify this by unzipping it and examine it with kpartx:
> gunzip /opt/xen/X-Local-ISO/ipfire-2.17.1gb-ext4-scon.i586-full-core87.img > kpartx -l /opt/xen/X-Local-ISO/ipfire-2.17.1gb-ext4-scon.i586-full-core87.img loop0p1 : 0 122880 /dev/loop0 8192 loop0p3 : 0 1536000 /dev/loop0 131072 loop deleted : /dev/loop0
Let's copy the image to our vhd file:
> cat /opt/xen/X-Local-ISO/ipfire-2.17.1gb-ext4-scon.i586-full-core87.img > /run/sr-mount/26b9d87b-f344-1c8d-c5c5-a155d4e4e2e0/72e00fc6-98bb-48fe-ab4d-b52d1ef721b5.vhd
Using zcat, the image doesn't even need to be unzipped before the copy:
> zcat /opt/xen/X-Local-ISO/ipfire-2.17.1gb-ext4-scon.i586-full-core87.img.gz > /run/sr-mount/26b9d87b-f344-1c8d-c5c5-a155d4e4e2e0/72e00fc6-98bb-48fe-ab4d-b52d1ef721b5.vhd
We can verify that our vhd file now contains 2 partitions:
> kpartx -l /run/sr-mount/26b9d87b-f344-1c8d-c5c5-a155d4e4e2e0/72e00fc6-98bb-48fe-ab4d-b52d1ef721b5.vhd loop0p1 : 0 122880 /dev/loop0 8192 loop0p3 : 0 1536000 /dev/loop0 131072 loop deleted : /dev/loop0
