Somewhere out there!

I spent much of yesterday trying to get a XGT for Ubuntu Feisty working. What a PITA!

Ars at Ubuntu Live: Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote:

“The next LTS release will be based on Ubuntu 8.04, which is currently planned for release in April 2008,” said Shuttleworth. “We believe we can bring the same level of predictability to the LTS releases as we have to the regular six-month release cycle… There will be a regular series of LTS releases approximately two years apart, starting in 2008 and continuing from there.”

A discussion and tips on optimising VMWare Server on NFS & RedHat Cluster Suite. Similar methods will be useful for XenEnterprise v4.

I’ve been meaning to put a few notes together of some work on Ubuntu XGT templates for XenEnterprise I did in June, but XE v4 supposely has a new system so I’ll have to check that out first. I did note this blog entry a few days ago and decided to put a tip bits of my own up.

The OSS version Xen is more tightly integrated with the host operating system and disk device node directly from the host to Linux guests. So /dev/sdb1 in the host could be /dev/sda1 in the guest. XenEnterprise acts more like Vmware and passes LVM blocks though to the guests as disks. Just like Vmware this makes it a much trickier in XE to resize or act directly on a mount file system from the host.

If the guest is shutdown the best method for accessing the filesystem is to use kpartx or lomount combined with losetup.

First find the details:

From Brian Madden – Login Consultants releases a massive framework that can automate pretty much everything. Oh, and it’s free:

It’s called the Solution4 Framework (or “S4 Framework” for short), and it’s basically a huge set of scripts, scripts, tools, and more scripts that you can use to completely manage your Terminal Server or Citrix Presentation Server farm.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to this post I’ve discovered ssh-copy-id. I’ve thought about putting a quick script like this myself in the past, but given this is included in the standard openssh distribution is makes life much easier.

I did a quick test install of Windows 2008 Standard Server Beta2 onto my XenEnterprise server. Requires the PV drivers in order for the network interfaces to works correctly, but otherwise seems to work with XE 3.2. I didn’t test much; at this stage I just wanted to see if I could get it going.

If you get a couple errors like dm-linear: Device lookup failed or mount: /dev/sdc1 already mounted or /export busy on XenEnterprise with Ubuntu Dapper, I suggest: apt-get remove -\-purge evms. See this bug report for some extra details.

I stopped using evms many years ago when it corrupted some of my data, lvm by itself its a much better system. I wish Ubuntu wouldn’t include it by default.

Untangle integrates best-of-breed OSS source for spam blocking, web filtering, remote access, reporting features and a nice java-based management tool. The free version is very functional, with the pro version adding features like client-less Java SSL vpn portal and AD integration. Virtual Rack system allows you to provide different service levels to different networks. Check out the 4m demo.

Personally I might install just for the Openvpn management functionality.

From The 2007 AO 100 Top Companies.