# Installing FreeBSD 6.3 as a guest on XenServer



## musicophilic (Feb 28, 2013)

Hello Everyone,

This is my first post on this forum, so please excuse any mistakes and lack of information if there is any. I will gladly provide information if asked. However, please know that I'm very new to working with FreeBSD.

So, here is the problem. I'm trying to install a High Performance FreeBSD 6.3 VM on a XenServer. The XenServer has 64 Gigs RAM, 24 CPUs and 1 TB of hard disk.

I was looking forward to install a VM with 6 VCPUs, 8-12 Gigs of RAM and 100 GB hard disk.

When I tried installing the i386 RELEASE, it ignored all memory above 4GB and later I came to know that it supports only 4GB, so I tried installing the amd64 release.

However, when I install an amd64 RELEASE, I'm able to boot the VM with 12 Gigs of Memory but I'm unable to ping the gateway and hence I can't access the box from my network. When I reduce the Memory to 2 Gigs, it is successfully pinging the Gateway.

Any thoughts on this? Any help would be greatly appreciated.


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## SirDice (Feb 28, 2013)

FreeBSD 6.3 is end-of-life since January 2010 and thus unsupported. Use a recent and supported version.

http://www.freebsd.org/security/#unsup


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## musicophilic (Feb 28, 2013)

I'm required to use FreeBSD 6.3 as all previous development has been done based on it.

Just out of curiosity, what does unsupported mean? Its just another Operating system. I don't want you to try out the scenario. Can you just throw light on where the problem might lie?


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## SirDice (Feb 28, 2013)

Unsupported means you aren't getting support from here. It also means there haven't been any security patches since the EoL date. And there have been several security issues discovered since, they will never be fixed. The ports tree and the ports within them may or may not work, if it doesn't work, it will not be fixed.

It's a dead version, stop using it.


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## kpa (Mar 1, 2013)

The ports(7) system is already non-functional on 6.x versions of FreeBSD because it uses a make(1) syntax that requires at least FreeBSD 7.


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## throAU (Mar 1, 2013)

SirDice said:
			
		

> Unsupported means you aren't getting support from here. It also means there haven't been any security patches since the EoL date. And there have been several security issues discovered since, they will never be fixed. The ports tree and the ports within them may or may not work, if it doesn't work, it will not be fixed.
> 
> It's a dead version, stop using it.



This.

See other posts on this very forum for reports of people being hacked due to still running 6.x.

It's not a matter of IF you will get hacked if it is exposed to the internet, it's a matter of WHEN.



As far as your memory vs. network problems go - if I'm not mistaken, AMD64 support in 6.x was somewhat experimental and not really recommended for production.

I suspect the driver for your network card in 6.x is not 64 bit compatible; despite compiling, it is probably not able to access some area of memory needed to function when 64 bit addressing is in use.

Additionally, massive SMP performance improvements were made in 7.x.  All signs point towards you being well advised to migrate the application to 9.x if possible.  You may have luck getting it working using the compat6x packages, have you tried at all?


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