Known Element Enterprises Corporate Blog

FTC is investagating the Google Doubleclick deal (NY TImes Story). Looks like the FTC listened to me. Good times good times. Glad someone is finally bringing Google into line. I would have to say that Google is the greatest threat of our time right now. The amount of power they possess under a single roof is terrifying.

I have found that to greatly improve the performance of Windows guests it is a good idea to pre allocate your vmware disks. If you have existing guests/drives that aren’t preallocated you can convert them with the vmware-vdiskmanager.

I have reinstalled Windows 2k3 Standard x64 on my laptop and W2k3 Standard 32bit on the server using preallocated drives, and am seeing vastly improved performance.

Also Solaris appears to need this as well.

Linux guests appear to be fine with non preallocated disks.

So I thought it would be a good idea to post an updated TODO list and set some new milestones. Hopefully this will be a more accurate representation of reality

First off what have I accomplished?

1. Configured the UPS on the media server. (Core infrastructure related work. See this post and this one for more information on UPS configuration)
2. Configured a dual monitor setup (Extra project but it was well worth the time spent! (See this post for more information on dual monitor configuration)
3. Configured the 4 port network card (Core infrastructure project).
4. Deployed Zabbix to monitor my physical and virtual machines.
5. Installed Bacula on all clients (both physical and virtual machines).

Second What is left?

1. Find the UPS USB cord and configure the vmware server the same as the media server.
2. Finish configuring Zabbix for monitoring
3. Finish configuring Bacula

Third When do I want to have it completed by?

I will be configuring Bacula tomorrow (5/28/2007). Hopefully I will find the UPS USB cord sometime soon. Once that is done it will be a simple matter to configure it as it requires copying the existing configuration files and changing the host name. I plan to get Zabbix monitoring mostly configured by the end of the week as well.

My overall goal is to have all of the core infrastructure work completed by the end of May and make June cluster month.

With the help of my good friend Mike Fedyk, I have made some major progress this weekend. We setup a router/firewall in a virtual machine on my main vmware/file server. I will be bringing my public server back online shortly as my IP address has changed, and I have a few configuration changes to make in an effort to increase security.

Also as I mentioned in a previous post, I have purchased an external LCD monitor and got it to work under ubuntu. With the power of virtual desktops and dual monitors I am now extremely productive!!! Go me!

Setting up the router was very straightforward and I learned a lot about networking and firewall data flow. I highly recommend the use of a virtual machine for routing, as it gives you quite a bit of flexibility and the really nice ability to get to your router even if you destroy the configuration (well that is if your still able to access your vmware host).

I purchased an LCD monitor from best buy today. I have set it up as a second display by following the instructions from
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/dual-monitors-with-nvidia.html

The built in nvidia-settings command didn’t work and I had to edit the xorg.conf file as per the HOWTO. I used the following search
( http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ubuntu+dual+monitors+laptop+nvidia&btnG=Google+Search ) to find the HOWTO (keywords ubuntu dual monitors laptop nvidia)

W00t!

So I wanted to give my audience a quick update on the various items I have been working on. 

1) Website Update. I have updated my homepage (http://thewybles.com/~charles/). I have made it more “personal” and moved my professional stuff off to a new website. It is designed to highligt the open source work I have done as well as some of the consulting stuff I am trying to build up again.  ( http://www.opensourcedeliverysystems.com/ ) 

2) New Lilax Website. I have been working on a redesign of the Lilax.net site. (http://lilax-beta.sfvlug.com/)

3) Cluster/configuration management stuff. I have been doing a lot of research into Puppet ( http://puppet.reductivelabs.com/ ) and am looking to write a VmWare provider. 

4) Core infrastructure stuff. Hopefully I will have Bacula working by the end of this week. 

5) SFVLUG Stuff. Trying to keep the speaker queue filled, as well as capturing more of what the LUG does and sharing the information it produces. 

6) General LUG stuff. I am making an active effort to produce a (video)podcast of all presentations at the various lugs and groups (LAMPSIG/SFVLUG/Lilax/UUASC). 

So I have been keeping busy. Looks like June is also going to be a cluster month as I ended up spending most of May on core infrastructure work.

I am a big fan of panel based presentations, especially ones that compare and contrast various items in the same category. We have had a couple of those at Lilax (virtulization and open source exchange replacements). Our latest one will be an open source desktop bake off.

The players:

Linspire
Novell (Suse)
Sun (Solaris and Java Desktop)
Ubuntu
Ulteo

I have created a web page (http://www.opensourcedeliverysystems.com/osdb.html) with some more information and will be posting more details as the become available (such as speakers etc). Hope to see everyone there!

So I just finished rebuilding my laptop. I backed up my home directory and /etc to a usb drive last night and reinstalled this morning. My new disk setup is

4 gigabyte swap partition
20 gigabyte root partition (ext3)
96 gigabyte home partition (xfs)

I needed a swap partition so I could do suspend. I have tried user space and kernel suspend and they both work. Well they both suspend and resume, but only user space suspend brings X back up. Kernel suspend doesn’t. I am guessing thats because I run the nvidia driver. Ah well userspace suspend it is then!

I did the XFS home partition because I deal with quite a bit of large files when doing my video taping at LUG meetings (see http://casts.sfvlug.com for podcasts and soon video casts). Hopefully this will give me better performance when handling these files.

Anyway thats my big project as of late

So I am just about done with the infrastructure stuff that I outlined in an earlier post. I will probably finish it up this weekend. My planned tasks are

1) Install the 4 port NIC card.
2) Finish setting up monitoring and backups.

After that I will be focusing on the clustering and SoCal Lug Cloud. The security stuff will be deferred to next June/July while I am preparing for Defcon

I am in the process of creating a project on source forge that will be used to host all of the code and documentation I create while working on the cluster and SoCal Lug Cloud. I have also registered a new domain (http://www.opensourcedeliverysystems.com/) which will hopefully be able to successfully market some of the resulting work to various companies. All of the code and documentation produced will be fully open source. OSDS will simply be the sales and marketing arm.

Off to install my network card and read up on backups now.

Oh I also joined several partner programs today (as part of a future effort to market some of the stuff that will come out of the cluster and SoCal Lug projects). I joined

1) Microsoft
2) HP
3) IBM
4) MySQL
5) SUN

I will be joining RedHat and Novell as well. Also I have purchased the Microsoft Action Pack which is the first step toward becoming a Microsoft Gold Partner. The cluster work I am doing will be operating system independent.

radio: please be aware of the one guy driving the wrong way!
guy: one? All of them!