Tried out VMWare Server 2 Beta this morning. Probably should have been called VMWare Server 2 Pre-Alpha-Gee-I-Hope-This Works.
They have apparently rid themselves of the solid, native GUI, instead opting for a web-driven management interface using Apache Tomcat, a web server, and a metric ton of Java. I also couldn’t log in to the thing without setting up a Windows password, which is stupid for a one-user desktop machine.
I’m all about release early, release often, but I think releases like this should come with a warning. This was nearly a 350MB download that sprayed a bunch of server technology on a clean machine (albeit the uninstall was smooth and comprehensive).
Gives me the feeling they’re actually using the VMWare Server user base to test features they want to use for the expensive VMWare Infrastructure, especially since that’s what the login screen said.
pete.home.local (nee “The Cooler Master” or more shortly “cooler”) is my AMD-based “gaming” machine, although I do little to no gaming on it. It was also a Media Center computer, but now it doesn’t have a TV tuner card.
Pete is having an identity crisis.
I wanted him to be a Linux music manager, but I couldn’t get the sound card working in Linux (in fact, I’m even having trouble with that in Windows).
I wanted him to virtualize Windows in VMWare, VirtualBox, or Xen, but he lacks the CPU optimizations (missed them by a few months) for Xen to work with Windows. VMWare lacks the sensible installer to work in Linux. VirtualBox worked fine (great, actually, quite impressive), but the sound card issue on the host side (meaning Linux) was pretty much a deal-breaker.
So now, apparently, I am dual-booting between Windows XP MCE (no more Vista!) and some form of Linux or OpenSolaris. The Windows side is for games, iPods (Kristin’s and mine), and Windows-only stuff. The Linux/Solaris side is for backups and Java/Python development.
Anyway, what a weekend trying to find out what virtualization stuff works in Linux!
This article makes me want to be home with a shiny new OpenSolaris disc in hand.
So, the idea here is quite simple, in the scheme of things:
You have pete.home.local, who is happily running OpenSolaris. Pete has a ZFS volume that’s actually just loop-mounted to a file within the system (maybe best described as a “fake hard drive within a hard drive”).
I back up data to this 200GB “fake” file system, which is then snapshotted periodically (a feature of ZFS) to create waypoints within the data. Then, these snapshots are “sent” to a USB hard disk for back-up-back-up storage whenever necessary.
The test case for this will be a blast. Basically, I will simulate a horde of rabid apes coming in and writing zeroes to that entire hard drive (simulating a “crash” and “replacement” of the drive). Then, I will reinstall OpenSolaris and load up the simulated “last good snapshot” from the USB drive.
If this works, I will dance a jig and be happy to finally have a coherent backup model for all these computers.
The icing on the cake is that future snapshot saves to the USB drive are incremental, meaning that any snapshots beyond the first are only the deltas over time.
Favorite refinery vocabulary word: raffinates. I suddenly get deja vu writing this… I need to bring my search function back.
Season 3 of The Office (US) is outstanding. I have had a few Arrested Development-style moments of paralyzation with laughter. It came out pretty fast on the Netflix direct-download service, so it’s been nice to not wait so long (or have to get them one-by-one in the mail).
I don’t want to spoil anything for anybody, but the whole Jim/Pam thing is handled quite well, despite it being protracted across such a long story arc. Aside from the obvious Dwight Shroot entertainment, the Jim/Pam story is enough to keep even a somewhat skinny episode going.
All this lazy typing in VBScript is driving me nuts. I can’t believe I’m doing “real work” with such a toy language.
Speaking of toys, Access allows you to name a column “Date,” but when you try to use ODBC to run SQL on the database, it chokes unless you rename the column. This is awesome, especially when you have this problem about once every three years and forget the solution each time.
Not that I couldn’t check or read my e-mail over the past week, but it wasn’t exactly easy to reply and file and stuff. That is all over now, as joey.home.local lives again. The CPU fan (while looking like the cheapest piece of OEM junk ever made) hums quietly (couldn’t be more than 20 dB… the previous fan in pre-failure mode had to have been 35-40 dB). The noise factor is huge in a bedroom.
I had a temporary scare, and it will take a moment to explain it. There is a piece of die-cut metal that comes with almost all motherboards. I tend to call this a “port plate” or a “back plate.” This is because it is a plate that covers up the gaps between all the various ports (keyboard, mouse, USB, serial, parallel, audio, etc.) on the back of a computer. It’s made of aluminum so it can flex and snap into place.
Anyway, the port plate that came with the new board did not have a LAN port punched out, and so I snapped it on to discover that I did not have an ethernet port. Shoot, said I, as a server is pretty darn useless without ethernet connectivity.
I installed a card in the (poor excuse for a) PCI slot on the board, only to find it was not Linux-compatible (at least immediately).
I issued an lspci, which for the uninitiated means “tell me what is plugged in to the PCI bus on my computer.” I saw a VIA-brand ethernet card.
Yes, kids, that’s right. I punched out the LAN port spot on the port plate to find an ethernet port right there.
Just two more days and I can have my server back! We’re really suffering. I have tons of mail back-queued in three different places, files are all out of order, I can’t access my music, and my network has been fairly unmanageable. Needless to say, it appears I have become dependent upon this small service.
joey.antesonic.org (or joey.home.local as we know him around here) revives himself on Wednesday evening, when UPS so kindly delivers a similar board I exchanged “in kind” with Newegg. All I needed was a blasted CPU fan, but I suppose such is life.
Instead of just rehashing (ha ha… you’ll see) the transaction that occurred here, I’ll just leave you to read the original post and my reply (check the handles for my obvious Slashdot id).
That is one of those Slashdot comment setups you wait for over the course of a year, only to find one with a reply so clearly at hand.
