I’ve been slightly disappointed with overall VirtualBox performance and decided to see what I could do to make things faster. For me, there are 3 elements to the performance issue. CPU, Disk and Network I/O. At this point, I only have possible solutions for two of the three areas.
My server ...
Lucid locked up on me today. The external disk array was really busy running multiple transcoding jobs at the time – love the quad core CPUs!. Those jobs filled up /raid, not any important file systems and locked up X/Windows. HOME is on a different FS too, BTW....
Installation of VirtualBox OSE (Open Source Edition) using the Ubuntu repositories should be easy. For me, there were a few issues that I figure other people may run into. I was able to solve them....
Xen as a Dom0 is not supported in Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) by Canonical. Both Canonical and Redhat have decided to get behind the KVM virtualization method instead. I think this was a choice driven by the required maintenance effort, since KVM hooks have been in the baseline Linux Kernel for about ...
What’s that saying? Some days you eat the bear and other days the bear eats you.
Or perhaps Stupid is as stupid does fits.
Ooops is something you never want to hear your system/network admin say. I’ve heard it said elsewhere and then watched as 200+ NASA servers all started rebooting. No...
Today the roofers are here putting up a new roof. I had a leak, but only when it rained REALLY hard – perhaps once a year. The old roof was 16+ yrs old, so it was about time. About half the neighborhood homes already have new roofs.
The guys were all here before 7:30a and ready to go. The weath...
The behavior of Samba network shares changed with a recent patch. There was a security issue where unix extensions and softlinks created undefined behavior. I use softlinks, perhaps more than I should, for convenience.
Anyway, after I completely my normal weekly system patching today, I noticed that...
Over the years, I’ve been using this blog to help myself remember how to do things and to share some great tools and techniques with you. I figure it is time to recap some of those articles whether they are computer, financial/retirement, or just interesting things....
Today I migrated a RAID5 external array from 1 server to my newly built Core i5 server. I specifically chose to use software RAID when I installed it in 2007 just so this migration would be possible and easy.
Basically, everything went as planned with only one small issue....
I’ve needed to build a new server for about 6 months, but delayed spending the money as long as possible. I’ll be reusing many old components and have purchased the main new items listed below.
Part 1 – Parts is Parts
Part 2 – Build
Part 3 – Burn In and OS
Part 4 Co...
I read a comment on a popular blog site today where people were complaining that Ubuntu didn’t work with their computer. They’d tried a few different versions and it still didn’t work. Of course, they blamed Ubuntu, not the hardware provider.
Some complained about sound or video or...
As I ponder how to build a redundant file server that serves Linux, Solaris, VMware, Xen, VirtualBox, FreeBSD, FreeNAS, TiVo and Windows systems, a few interesting articles have come to light.
A home file server using ZFS
Snapshots into the cloud
Backups with versioning
10 Reasons You need to Co...
I saw this story from the BBC today. The headline was Hacker renews extradition fight. After reading the story, I got that he’s afraid to come to the USA.
Gee, I wonder why?
Charges
He allegedly broke into 97 computer systems at NASA and US Navy in 2001-2002 causing $800,000 worth of damage. H...
The FINA World Diving contests have been occurring around the world in 2009. China, Mexico, England and in the USA. Fortunately, my cable system has added a channel, Universal Sports, that shows great sporting events that usually aren’t covered like basketball, football, hockey, and baseball. B...
INAL, but as an enterprise architect, here are a few key things I can think of that law offices need to add to their existing network and computer security practices.
Truecrypt – encryption is critical. Use it on all laptops and any data transferred off site.
par2 – parity to ensure th...
Most new IT efforts have a Green Component to them. At a minimum, the amount of power used is to be minimized for any new equipment. Other projects involve consolidating servers with a 4:1 or higher reduction. That reduction, when combined with fewer total number of CPUs, hence fewer licenses, more e...
Back to Part 2
So why would you want to run your desktop in a VM?
There are many reasons. Most of them have to do with the way that Virtual Machines aren’t connected directly with the hardware they run on.
Virtual Hardware: By virtualizing the actual hardware away, gone are the days of search...
Thunderbird – it does email and calendaring
Firefox (using 3.x now) Web Browser (plugins follow)
Adblock Plus – ads, what are those?
NoScript – only use JavaScript when YOU want
Sage-Too – RSS Feeds!!!
Linux and all the expected shell tools – duh.
ssh &...
Ok, so I’m migrating my servers from Ubuntu 6.xx to 8.xx and adding Xen virtualization along the way.
So far:
Regulus – Athlon 1800+
Xen Dom0 (reg0/regulus) running 8.04 and Xen from the Ubuntu repository.
1.2GB RAM
2×250GB Disks (sw mirrored)
Dom1 – reg1 256MB ...
Our trip to Macau, SAR, China. This is a former Portuguese colony.
That means, lots of Churches, graves, and less English.
It was raining much of the day.
We start off early in the morning. The Tin Hau station is empty. At Tsim Sha Tsui we catch the 7:45a TurboJet ferry to Macau.
In Macau, weR...
Ok, the USA is a nation of immigrants. My grandparents were not born in this country, yet both of my parents were able to go to college and almost all of their children did as well. Many of my cousins also went to college too. A few of my siblings have advanced degrees. Not bad for a family living ...
October 2010 Update
This article has been getting hit a bunch, so I thought an update might be helpful. The array built below is still working nicely. I’m still using it as a NAS, NFS, CIFS Server, Samba Server, DLNA server and for protected storage to the local machine. The local machine is n...
I came across a video editor – not fancy, but it works.
The name is ‘cbreak’. It is a MS-Windows command line utility – no don’t be afraid. It has a manual mode that goes through the entire AVI file (only works on AVI files) and figures out where the black frames are. ...
Need an external SATAII Enclosure? Check these guys out Very interesting.
Here’s another player. The DS-500 is an eSATA 5 drive RAID system.
You’ll want a hardware RAID 5 controller card too. Adaptec, LSI Logic, eWare, Highpoint and Raidcore are listed on Tom’s Hardware. High...
Building a new PC for my home "data center consolidation" effort. Here’s the equipment list (so far):
Motherboard: MSI 975X Platinum PowerUP v2 775
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (4mb cache)
Video: Gigabyte nVidia 7600GS 256MB Silent Pipe PCI-E 16x (GV-NX76G256D-RH)
2GB CORSAIR VS2GBKIT...
