Perhaps you'll remember me staring in disbelief when Dell placed a heatsink directly behind the PCIe slot in the OptiPlex 990 (apparently it's also the case in the 980).

You'll be happy to know that the motherboard layout has changed with the OptiPlex 9010.

I was setting up a hypervisor for RHEV running a full RHEL6 install instead of RHEV-H, and I wanted to tune it for better hypervisorness.

So I thought, Hey! I'll install tuned, since I am all excited about tuned after viewing the slides from Mark Wagner's Achieving Top Network Performance (PDF) at the 2012 Red Hat Summit. I was particularly excited about slide 12 entitled "Teaser 3 - latency."

I restarted a standalone KVM host running RHEL6 and when I opened Virtual Machine Manager, my guest virtual machine wasn't listed at all.

Eek!

Turns out I had been messing around with the XML definition in /etc/libvirt/qemu/machinename.xml (I know, I know...consider my hand slapped) and broke it. Fortunately /var/log/libvirt/libvirtd.log was kind enough to let me know what went wrong:

My use case was pretty simple. I wanted to share out a raw device via iSCSI to a nearby host on the 172.16.2.x network.

In addition to a minimal Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (or equivalent) install, a few packages are needed:

I knew the device I wanted to share was /dev/sdb by looking at the output from dmesg: