…we also approach the impending birth of our first child.  And as that day draws ever closer, the words of that most amusing, eclectic poet Gregory Corso keep playing in my head, from his poem, “Marriage”

Yes if I should get married and it’s Connecticut and snow
and she gives birth to a child and I am sleepless, worn,
up for nights, head bowed against a quiet window, the past behind me,
finding myself in the most common of situations a trembling man
knowledged with responsibility not twig-smear nor Roman coin soup-
O what would that be like!
Surely I’d give it for a nipple a rubber Tacitus
For a rattle a bag of broken Bach records
Tack Della Francesca all over its crib
Sew the Greek alphabet on its bib
And build for its playpen a roofless Parthenon

Well, at very least, I will probably purchase a Stim-Mobile.

That last entry is kind of an off-kilter but nonetheless viable segue into a realisation that I need to seriously consider making another concerted effort at meditation again, hopefully attaining at least a modicum of mastery. Monkey mind? A barrel-full of monkeys, my head is!

I’ve probably said this all before, but it’s a reminder to myself.

ZAMM was a nice diversion earlier this year, but it’s more philosophy than any sort of “mental relaxation” tome — something Pirsig himself acknowledges in the beginning of the book. I don’t know why I am even drawing it into this internal monologue other than the fact that 1) it is a passing reference to Zen, 2) I got a lot out of it and 3) it was a way to remove my mind from its constant churning, high-rev state. ZAMM is deep, to be sure. Maybe deep enough that I was able to focus that energy. Whatever the case, sometimes it revs so high that sticking to any one thing is impossible. I need to once again find an outlet.

Meditation, if I could achieve some sort of success, will be good. I will certainly need to be able to maintain level mindsets and focus when the baby comes!

So I’ve been spending parts of the last two evenings trying to get a xen guest installed. First thing that annoyed me right off is the necessity to use an http, ftp or nfs point as the source tree, versus a standard directory. Why, oh why?

Anyway, so I sez to myself, “ok, well, I’m running a webserver on this machine, I will just mount an iso over loop, within my webspace, and bingo!”

Right? WRONG… SELinux — which I have been trying to rationalise as that pile of veggies on your plate as a kid that you hate but have been told are good for you — won’t allow arbitrary directories to be accessed from within httpd. No, you need to run restorecon… and you can’t do so to a read-only volume!

With that, I temporarily set SELinux to Permissive, rebooted, and started trying to install my Xen guest.

Once again, no luck. Regardless of what tool I use — virt-manager or virt-install, I kept getting ‘Invalid Argument’ errors thrown back at me.

So after searching google for various, convoluted references to spammy errors, I simplified my search to ‘fedora xen “invalid argument’, which took me to something I wish I had seen all along, the Fedora Xen Quickstart FC6 page. SURELY this would save me!

Alas, my hopes were dashed and turned to petty rage when I read this:

Q. When creating a guest the message “Invalid argument” is displayed.
A. This usually indicates that the kernel image you are trying to boot is incompatible with the hypervisor. This will be seen if trying to run a FC5 (non-PAE) kernel on FC6 (which is PAE only), or if trying to run a bare metal kernel.

Ahem.

[root@ramen ~]# uname -r
2.6.18-1.2849.fc6xen

I re-read the page again. I grepped all the /proc info. I am cool there — not that I would expect otherwise, running a dual core AMD. Everything else matches, so I dunno what this Wiki is implying.

As a last gasp, I then decided that maybe I should try running against a real anaconda-friendly distribution tree, so I chose the mirror at Duke. Kicked off my install… it didn’t kick back an error right away… are we set this time?

No. As it turns out, I got the same error as before — it just took longer because I was accessing a site over the internet.

So, long story short, I am utterly out of ideas. Xen should be easy to configure — and it seems darn well like it’s been designed as such. Nonetheless, I’m a bit at the end of my rope with this thing.

(10 bonus points to anyone who recognises the pop culture reference in the title)

Admittedly, I am not a crazy Christmas music fiend like Jess. Nonetheless, as we will be hosting some of the family/friends holiday festivities this year, I found it convenient that DirecTV plays a bunch of the XM Radio stations, specifically the five or so seasonal Christmas ones.

Finding Special X-Mas was the best, however. Some of the, shall we say, lesser-played Christmas songs, to fill your holiday with cheer… and many I have never heard before. Yeah, we’ve all heard the Run DMC song, but what about Kurtis Blow? What about the lesser known sequel to “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer”? And then there’s this one, that I can’t believe I’d never heard before: “It’s the Most Fattening Time of the Year“.

Nevermind trying to find all the X-Mas songs of yesteryear — the dial is locked in, now.