Somewhere out there!

I happened to have two IBM WinXP laptops on my desktop tonight as I was installing the NX client on one of these machine before my brother goes to China at the end of the week.

Anyway, I had a remote NX desktop running on his machine to my colo Xen machine about 256kbps (50ms) DSL away and on mine I had the local NX desktop which I’ve been using as a test install for the past two weeks. Compression was set at modem speeds for the remote and LAN speeds for the local desktops. I decided I need a test to show off NX off to him and figured a quick look at my gallery would be good. And it was. It surprised even myself.

The remote desktop loaded this page faster than the local desktop. There was a definitely noticeable difference in page display speed in Firefox. The quality of the remote desktop on the two screens was hardily different. The thumbnails on the remote were slightly blurry, but not by much.

The remote machine is sitting next (Xen-wise) to the gallery web server and obviously my local desktop load the thumbnails over the DSL link. So this is a certain testament to NX’s performance given that same page and images were rendered and presented faster from the remote location.

I meant to post this a while back, but its been sitting in my queue. Back in February I purchase a x335. After some trials I got mpt-status and native hardware RAID functional under XEN. Although, testing the performance is still on my TODO list. Then April I got a x206 to replace a x205. The x206 said it had RAID 1 built-in with linux drivers, and thus didn’t require an additional RAID card. I should have recalled that linux drivers, most often for RAID means Redhat only binary drivers.

From a clean install of Ubuntu/Hoary, I used the following to build FreeNX from source. This also works with Debian/Sarge.

Add the following to your apt source.list and run an update:

deb http://debian.tu-bs.de/project/kanotix/unstable/ ./
deb-src http://debian.tu-bs.de/project/kanotix/unstable/ ./

Install the following build-depends packages:
sudo apt-get install cdbs autotools-dev patchutils autoconf bzip2 zlib1g-dev libpng12-dev libjpeg-dev xlibs-dev libfreetype6-dev libmikmod2-dev libssl-dev libxaw7-dev automake1.9

On Debian sarge you might need this as well:
sudo apt-get install build-essential

Pull the sources (~40Mb):
apt-get source nx freenx.

Build the debs:
cd nx-1.4.0.2; fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -b; cd ..; sudo dpkg -i *.deb; cd freenx-0.4.0/; fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -b; cd .. ; sudo dpkg -i freenx_0.4.0-0pre1_all.deb .

Bob’s your uncle.

I’ve got FreeNX working well in a Xen based instance of Hoary using the FreeNX defaults with the !M keys. I’m able to connect from the three !M NX clients I tried: Linux, Windows and OSX. Sound was working with the Windows client, it required the esound daemon. I found this a little chompy, and turned it off for now. I haven’t tried this with the Linux client yet. There are a couple notes here about LTSP and sound that I might investigate at a later stage. Session suspend works, although with OSX it seems you have to kill the X11 server, as the NX client itself refuse listen to the close button.

Its possible to use a similar process for nxclient at:
deb-src http://kanotix.com/files/debian/ ./

Some comments from a OpenSolarias developer about Solarias on Xen.

Replaced my old colo machine with a newer IBM X335 SCSI RAID1 based system this afternoon. Usually story, things never go according to plan.

I’ve replaced my User-Mode-Linux based system with XEN. Seems to work well. There are a few performance issues. I think though this is mainly network related. All the disk direct benchmarks I’ve done so far seem to indicate similar performance for the host and guest domains. Of course, since the Host is itself a guest of of the hypervisor it doesn’t running completely at native speeds. Unfortunately I didn’t spend the time doing some disk benchmarks for non-XEN kernels. However the “buffered disk reads” figures I posted previously should be the almost twice as much for a SCSI U160 system.

No matter, at least its better than the glum and glue I was using previous. I’m use the XEN guys will get around to improving this performance in due course. Anyway the performance in the guests is better than a UML based system, and I never really had much luck with the Linux vserver project.

If my back wasn’t giving my some issues at the moment, I’d probably make a short list of issues I had while upgrading and reinstalling the guest OSs. Then getting the applications (include wordpress) back up an running. For instances, took me a while to realise that mysql.so was commented out in php.ini by default. I was fiddling around with mysql GRANT tables, and all manor of other stuff. WordPress needs a better error message for this situation, more like the phpmyadmin. While on the subject of MYSQL Grant tables, this page is a the main reference on the various different levels (column, table, database, global) of privileges.
Anyway a list of these later.

Howto setup FreeBSD and Xen.