Impossible to add shared physical device

[karaluh]

Binary package hint: virt-manager

To reproduce:
1. connect to remote machine in virt-manager (ssh in my case),
2. open the virtual machine,
3. add new network device.
4. "Shared physical device" is inactive (greyed out)

Host - Jaunty, client - Karmic

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Wed Oct 21 16:02:07 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
Package: virt-manager 0.7.0-3ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=pl_PL:pl:en_GB:en
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=pl_PL.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-13.44-generic
SourcePackage: virt-manager
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-13-generic i686

[falstaff (falstaff)]

I have this problem too. I have a karmic host and a karmic client. I connect over ssh to the server. The server has br0 configured as bridge. But I don't get the "Shared physical devices" listed in the GUI.

I edited the config files of the domain directly and added theses lines:
    <interface type='bridge'>
      <mac address='00:16:3e:1a:b3:ca'/>
      <source bridge='br0'/>
    </interface>

This works like a charm, but would be nice to have a GUI to do that...

I found an interessiting blog articel about that problem:
http://ramblings.narrabilis.com/wp/virt-manager-cannot-select-shared-physical-device-when-configuring-network/

A default server installation doesnt have a hal daemon/dbus daemon installed, has it?

[Aaron J. Zirbes (ajz)]

virtManager/connection.py only looks at local devices through the dbus interface to list bridge connections

This does not work for remote management of Virtual Machine hosts on remote servers (confirmed via SSH)

In addition the default server install doesn't install the dbus daemon.

I would say that this but is severely impacting the ability to easily move Ubuntu Server into the Enterprise Datacenter as a simple Virtualization solution.

I would say this should be fixed, especially because Canonical is pushing Ubuntu Server as a stable Virtualization platform.

I don't know much about python, or I'd fix it myself. Any Python hackers watching this?

[Aaron J. Zirbes (ajz)]

I haven't heard anything on this lately. For all those with this problem my temporary fix is to
   sudo apt-et install install virt-manager
on the server, and
   ssh -Y
into the server, then run
   sudo virt-manager

to use virt-manager "locally" on the server.

This is not the desired solution as it requires a larger footprint on the server, but it will work for now.