Somewhere out there!

Early drafts avaliable online.

This has been sitting my drafts for a while. Might be useful.

I’ve collected a few interesting pages in providing remote booting with Vmware and Xen guests.

Using AoE and Etherboot. This is still work in progress.

http://www.coraid.com/support/linux/contrib/vantuyl/aoeboot.html

HOWTO: AOE in domU and boot from it. http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-users/2006-07/msg00595.html

My target environment is XEN, and the relevent parameters to be changed are:

ramdisk = "/boot/img.aoe"
root = "/dev/etherd/e9.0 ro"

(or whatever your aoe target happens to be… I think that was the vblade
default example).

http://www.emboot.com/products_winboot_i_FAQ.htm#q6

Can I PXE boot to an iSCSI target from within a virtual machine from VMware or Microsoft?

Yes, you can use winBoot/i to network boot VMware and Microsoft virtual machines from an iSCSI target. HBA-equipped systems hosting virtual machines generally do not allow sharing (or virtualization) of the HBA-capability within the vm environment. We recommend using our Managed Boot Agent on Disk (MBAoD) for VMs to PXE-enable the virtual NIC within the virtual machine.

http://www.emboot.com/VMware_howto.html

b62 is probably a couple months away, so I’m no doubt going to have to learn how to BFU solaris before I can try out zfs booting. However when I do it should be easier to go further: Friday fun with BFU and ZFS root. Also a script to automate the grub and zfs booting process.

Technorati Tags: solaris, zfs

A quick run on the Solaris method (Brandz) for running Linux. You can also do this with Solaris as a xen dom0.

Personally, I’ll stick to plain Solaris zones. I’m over the worst of the Solaris learning curve. I’m looking at Solaris for servers and most of the apps I want to run are open source. It’s a lot less hassle to build from source (or use blastwave) than to maintain Yet Another OS Instance just to run the same apps against glibc.

Zones gives you multiple environments without the hassle of multiple OSes to maintain, which most virtualization solutions seem to overlook. In addition, Solaris resource management is very fine grained inside a zone (per-project limits can co-exist with per-zone limits). I can’t say the same for other OSes I’ve tried. This helps to minimize the number of zones you need.

Haven’t got to this point in my Solaris experience yet, its a heavy learning curve. Especially without something decent like Running Linux. Work in progress as I say.

Some tips for using VMware server in production.

Technorati Tags: vmware, tips

Clearspace is a team collaboration java based application that integrates IM, files, wiki and blogs. It is commercial, but has a free-to-use 5 user version. Openfire is a jabber/XMPP server which seems very powerful. It is open-source, but has a commercial version with additional features.

I’ve been planning to try out some Jabber servers once I get my new hardware in place. Openfire has a nice looking admin interface and seems to be well built. I might not have to look far.  Clearspace might also compete with the Alfresco planning I’ve been doing.

From IT Redux.

Technorati Tags: jabber, xmpp

Big Debian Linux Payday For HP

HP is making $25 million by supporting the free Debian GNU/Linux distribution in what may ultimately turn out to be a challenge to commercial distributions from Novell and Red Hat.

ZFS Boot is going to make things a lot to try out with Opensolaris. Snapshot based system upgrades is a very interesting feature.

Technorati Tags: zfs

I really respect Jonathan Schwartz, he has made Sun and Solaris worth considering again. He seems to combined the best qualities of a visionary big company leader who understands technology. A geek who can explain things to big business. Not an straight-forward combination.

For along time Sun was the heart of Unix, but with the advent of GNU+Linux and building of the open-source community in the late 90s Sun has fallen well behind the innovation cycle. Currently people do not (in general) create and use products like Xen, Zimbra, Alfresco, or Asterisk on Solaris. Companies like Google and Paypal use Linux at the edge to drive deployment and increase their innovation productivity, maybe leaving Solaris to the backend traditional well-structured heavy loads.

Read the rest of this entry »

A recipe for building a Mac like Rails DE on Windows.

Technorati Tags: rails, windows