PowerEdge 1950 Xen Hate

We’re trying to get Xen running on our new, fresh, Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers. The install itself was pretty uneventful. Plenty of distros offer pretty decent support for the Xen Hypervisor from their default install (we’re currently testing it with FC6). A major bummer, though, was that the networking part of Xen just plain wouldn’t start in Dom0. The network bridge just plainly didn’t want to receive back packets coming to the interface, so stuff like ARP just didn’t work at all.

It turns out the problem lies with the built-in management firmware that Dell puts on these broadcoms. You can look here for a solution. Beware, the solution involves Windows to unpack the file and MSDOS to change the IPMI settings.