qemu-guest-agent for Debian Lenny

[ayozeve]

Hello, I have a client who wants to virtualize his computer with proxmox but his requirement is that he has a machine with debian Lenny (5) running an application internally from a database in which data is occasionally entered and it seems that updating it does not it is a possibility for them. After searching I have not found the qemu agent for debian Lenny no matter how hard I have looked. Has anyone ever been in a similar case and found it? Thank you

Regards

 

[datschlatscher]

Wow this is quite the rabbit hole.
From what I could gather it seems that development of the qemu-guest agent started around mid 2011, at which point Debian Lenny was already superseded by Debian Squeeze.
I could find neither release nor source for any qemu-guest-agent packages from around this time. The Debian package tracker only offers packages for Debian Stretch.
If you want to continue searching you might find something through the use of Google dorking. For example, filter everything before a date before:YYYY-MM-DD` (e.g. before:2012-01-01). You can also search the qemu-devel email lists for the tag qemu-ga which seems to be the tag associated with the guest agent. Apart from that some rather obscure package archives might be your only hope.

It really depends how important the guest agent is for your use case, though. You might reach a point where you would have to exert so much energy for finding this, that it might actually be easier to convince the customer of doing something else.

 

[leesteken]

You can run VMs without qemu-guest-agent (there are many OSes out there without it), Proxmox will use ACPI for shutdown events. I'm not sure about snapshot backups because Proxmox cannot do a fs-freeze (sync to disk) without it, I think. Maybe just do backups in Stop mode instead?

 

[LnxBil]

After searching I have not found the qemu agent for debian Lenny no matter how hard I have looked. Has anyone ever been in a similar case and found it?

You talk about a package. You can always download the source and try to compile it. I did this a couple of times for older releases, but I cannot recall if I did this for Lenny. It could work. Do you have a (Debian) developer at hand that can do this for you?

 

[LnxBil]

You talk about a package. You can always download the source and try to compile it. I did this a couple of times for older releases, but I cannot recall if I did this for Lenny. It could work. Do you have a (Debian) developer at hand that can do this for you?

I just tried and it is a little bit trickier than intially thought. The guest-agent builds correctly, but it cannot run with the default virtio serial interface, because Lenny does not support virtual devices, it's too old. Next steps would be:
- trying manually adding qemu guest agent with args and serial-isa
- trying backported kernel
- just upgrade your container

I would expect that in total it's at least 4h (I already spend over 1h and I had lenny container templates I creates years ago) for a developer to even try (if he's capable and experienced also in older debian releases). Maybe the money is better spend on upgrading the lenny container to a newer version and try to fix any problem that may arise from the update.

Another idea is to containerize the application from QEMU/KVM to a LX(C) container. This works great and in the end you don't need any guest agent to play with it.

 

[ayozeve]

Wow this is quite the rabbit hole.
From what I could gather it seems that development of the qemu-guest agent started around mid 2011, at which point Debian Lenny was already superseded by Debian Squeeze.
I could find neither release nor source for any qemu-guest-agent packages from around this time. The Debian package tracker only offers packages for Debian Stretch.
If you want to continue searching you might find something through the use of Google dorking. For example, filter everything before a date before:YYYY-MM-DD` (e.g. before:2012-01-01). You can also search the qemu-devel email lists for the tag qemu-ga which seems to be the tag associated with the guest agent. Apart from that some rather obscure package archives might be your only hope.

It really depends how important the guest agent is for your use case, though. You might reach a point where you would have to exert so much energy for finding this, that it might actually be easier to convince the customer of doing something else.

Yes, the eternal struggle for companies to update. It is an option that I do not completely rule out, although it is complicated.

 

[ayozeve]

You can run VMs without qemu-guest-agent (there are many OSes out there without it), Proxmox will use ACPI for shutdown events. I'm not sure about snapshot backups because Proxmox cannot do a fs-freeze (sync to disk) without it, I think. Maybe just do backups in Stop mode instead?

Yes, but i prefer try to install because they work with databases so the snapshot are important.

 

[ayozeve]

I just tried and it is a little bit trickier than intially thought. The guest-agent builds correctly, but it cannot run with the default virtio serial interface, because Lenny does not support virtual devices, it's too old. Next steps would be:
- trying manually adding qemu guest agent with args and serial-isa
- trying backported kernel
- just upgrade your container

I would expect that in total it's at least 4h (I already spend over 1h and I had lenny container templates I creates years ago) for a developer to even try (if he's capable and experienced also in older debian releases). Maybe the money is better spend on upgrading the lenny container to a newer version and try to fix any problem that may arise from the update.

Another idea is to containerize the application from QEMU/KVM to a LX(C) container. This works great and in the end you don't need any guest agent to play with it.

Thanks a lot for your help. The option to turn it into a container seems great to me. And also to take into account as a possible decision for similar problems. I get to work with it. Thank you very much

 

[LnxBil]

Yes, but i prefer try to install because they work with databases so the snapshot are important.

Database should always use their own backup. A snapshot is only crash-consistent.