JDPFu.com 2025

I’ve been interested in saving some money on home phone service since around 2001 when I dropped the babybell service for a VoIP solution. Over the years, I’ve switched providers and ended up with the cable company phone service to get the best quality for the buck. Now they’ve raised the prices and I’m looking again. I’m not interested in Vonage at $25/month when a $3/month plan will cover me. Further, I already own the necessary equipment to get this all working. You may already own the equipment too.

It always seemed that a $3/month SkypeOut account could be linked to a PBX (Asterisk/FOSS) to make this happen. A few months ago, I asked about this on Lifehacker, but didn’t get any acceptable answers.

As some of you may know, I am a consultant, primarily with UNIX, virtualization and systems architecture. The last few days, I’ve been setting up a fairly low cost backup solution for a 100% MS-Windows shop running VMWare ESX 3.×. They have 15+ VMs and the old backup system had been shutdown and wiped more than a few months ago. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the prior backup solution except that the day-to-day system users didn’t know much about the setup. My task was to get that system working again.

The Tools

1. Trilead VM Explorer – the VMware compatible VMDK backup software. Not the free version.
2. Fire Daemon Pro – to run the backup task on a schedule.
3. MS-Batch – .CMD files – to selectively control which VMs are backed up on specific days without point-and-click requirements.
4. Service Accounts – this is very important in the MS-Windows world.

If you are looking for the smallest Linux possible and want to add just a few applications, then you really need to look at TinyCore.

11MB of disk, 64MB of RAM (perhaps less), 2.6.xx kernel, X11 or not, your choice. What more do you need to know?

Small Footprint in Disk AND Memory – 11MB

Do you have 11MB of Disk and 64MB of RAM? TinyCore Linux will work for you.

How to ask for help for Linux issues.

All of us need a little help now and again. Linux users aren’t any different than MS-Windows or Mac users in that regard. The difference is that to get help for Linux, you need to do a little more research first.

We’ll assume you don’t have a nearby Linux knowledgeable friend that knows everything. You’ll need to ask people you do not know for help. Or, perhaps you are the Linux guru in your circle of friends and your questions are more complex than most.

Below, I’ll suggest a few methods to use to get help and outline the data you should include in your requests to optimize the ability of others to actually be helpful to you.

When you see these messages, what does that mean to you?

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 is running Ubuntu Server x64 10.04 with VirtualBox 3.1.6 OSE directly from the Ubuntu repository. Below, I’ll describe how to improve both disk and network I/O performance. I think these suggestions will apply to other versions and MS-Windows hosts too.

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 a year and Xen inclusion into the Linux kernel doesn’t seem likely at any point in the future. Supporting Xen kernels is just too tough.

I use virtualization … a lot. I started writing an article entitled Converting WinXP from VirtualBox to KVM today, but couldn’t due to issues.

The latest thing I’m trying to accomplish is to migrate to KVM for all the current VM needs that I have. This may not be a good idea since we’re running Xen, VirtualBox and ESXi VM hosts. Today I attempted to convert a WindowsXP Professional install running under VirtualBox 3.x to KVM. I’ve attempted this conversion before, but it failed, badly. This time, I’m using VMware Converter and it failed before it even got started.

I watch lots of cloud computing articles. If you follow this blog, you know that I’m not a fan of outside cloud computing, but I love internal virtualization, an internal enterprise cloud, if you will.

Let’s look at some real-world pricing.