Planet TLLTS

I decided that on my vacation I would do some catch-up work. I have many times mentioned that I am a consummate procrastinator, and if you combine that with me being just generally whooped tired after 12 hours away from home on any average day, you understand why my computers seem to go uncared for. I think it’s the same as the whole “the mechanics car is never fixed” thing.

I mentioned a couple days ago that I installed ESXi on one of my home servers (redundant servers) to fix a strange problem I had been having with VMware Server 2.x. That was the first job I needed to so, or at least the most important, and so far it has been doing beautifully.

Next on the list was Mint 8 on the old laptop. It has been running Mint 7 since the distro was released and it was time for an upgrade. Everything was working just fine on 7, I just wanted to catch up the latest/greatest. As expected, the upgrade was a no-brainer and it’s running gorgeously, as Mint does.

Today, so far, I decided to upgrade my desktop machine to Mint 8. This machine, a P4 3Ghz with 3Gb of ram runs like absolute crap. I don’t exactly know why, but it always has. Now I have replaced the cpu fan a couple times and also the power supply at least twice. The computer is noisy, whiny, but not physically broken that I can tell. It just seems to run slower than hell and always has. The installation of Mint 8 on it did make it prettier, but sure didn’t make it seem to run any faster. I think it just dogs over the dual display and craptasticly old Nvidia card. Perhaps if I bought it a new quiet power supply, a better working and quieter cpu fan, a new better video card and a new dvdrom drive (yeah that’s pretty broken too), I could resuscitate this thing so that I could stand using it again. But then again, I could probably buy a whole new desktop computer for what I would spend on repairs to this one. Dang.

So, what’s next? Well, I should install ESXi on my redundant server now that I am satisfied with how the other one is running. I should also upgrade to Mint 8 on my Acer Aspire All In One netbook (notice a pattern here). Other than that, I am not sure.. Maybe work on some code projects I have been stringing along for months and months.

So what kinds of great computery projects are you all up to? Or what SHOULD you be up to

WHEW!

A couple days ago I relayed the story about how my VMware Server 2 infrastructure was suffering some issues. Basically it would randomly just shut down my VMs. I don’t know why. I absolutely poured over the logs for days on end while simultaneously searching google for *any* inkling or hint of an idea on how to remedy the situation or even why it was happening. Nothing….

Frustrated, I was searching around for a different solution and after passing on Virtualbox, Parallels, KVM and others for various reasons, not the least of which was the learning curve on some, I settled on ESXi. I run a lot of ESX and some ESXi at work, so the familiarity is there and it’s been my experience that it’s a rock solid and stable platform, not to mention that it’s bare metal and wickedly fast.

There were some drawbacks. ESX(i) requires a Windows management interface (or Virtual Infrastructure Controller – VIC) and I wasn’t even sure my hardware would accomidate. You see, ESXi has only a certain set of hardware that it will work with.

Well, after a bit of research, I was mostly convinced that my hardware would work, albeit with a little tweak to get the IDE drive recognised. I registered for, and downloaded the free ESXi 4.x release from http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/, burned it to a cd and I was off to the races.

The installation was completely a no-brainer. Just put the cd in, boot it up and go. It really is an almost no-touch install. I was also pleasantly surprised that it recognised my IDE drive automatically with no tweaking whatsoever. When the install was done, there were only a couple settings to adjust like configuring the IP address and root password, and they are all accessed and changed in a very plain and simple text interface. All in all, in less than a half an hour and with 1 reboot I had an ESXi server just begging me for some VMs.

Once it was up and running I decided I would try everything possible NOT to have to resort to running Windows at home for a management interface. Luckily, other people have decided the same and there is good information available on the web on using the built in command line tools to do what you need to. And they aren’t difficult at all.

First, I needed to be able to access the command line tools on ESXi, and that required turning on SSH access. I followed the instructions here:
http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/ESXi_enable_SSH.php

After that, I needed to get my VMware Server 2.x VMs on the ESXi box. I turned to VMware Converter for that. Downloaded it (again free) from VMware and installed it on my VMware Server 2.x host machine so that the converter would have access to the local VM files.

I shut down the VMs and used vmware converter to convert them to the ESXi box. Each conversion of a 12GB VM took approximately 40 minutes (give or take). Since the converter is a GUI app, I did a “ssh -Y vmwareserver2host vmware-converter.pl” to run the converter console on my local machine because my vmwareserver2 machine is a headless server.

When the VMs were converted to the ESXi box, I took a cue from this page:
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/833003030931/m/150009304931
to add vncserver to each VM, which allowed me to connect to the VMs and make 1 integral change to each virtual machine when they were running.

To get the machines running I used ESXi’s “vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms” command on the ESXi box, which listed all the VMs I copied there with their assigned vm number. “Then, I ran vim-cmd vmsvc/power.on #” where number is the vm number listed from the getallvms command.
Once they were started, I used vncviewer to connect to the VMs, log in and fix their networking. You see when you move a vm to a different host machine, the mac address gets reassigned and hoses up your VMs network config. Once that was quickly fixed, I rebooted the VMs and they were good to go!

There are a couple other things that I need to get tweaked, like adding my registration number to ESXi, which I found directions for at http://www.vm-help.com/esx40i/manage_without_VI_client_2.php. I also noticed that vmware adds some filesystem into the VMs /etc/hosts file which errors out on boot. Just comment that out and it’s fine. Lastly, since I migrated the VMs from Server 2.x, they already had the vmware tools from that loaded in and I noticed a little barking about those tools while the VMs were booting, so I disabled them by doing a “service vmware-tools stop ; chkconfig vmware-tools off” on my VMs which are CentOS, so your method of disabling those tools may vary.

My impressions so far: Although this all sounded hard, long and technical, nothing could be farther from the truth. It was extremely easy – much more than I had initially hoped. And, if my VMs *stay running* now, it will be well worth it. I also believe that these VMs ABSOLUTELY SCREAM compared to how they ran before. They are much more responsive now in every way. The change was well worth it!

I don’t know why, but I have always been fascinated by what people have on their desktops and how they have them configured. Well, today I ran into a link to a site I hadn’t visited in a long time, and that is Unixporn. No, it’s not porn, it’s a bunch of people sharing how cool their desktop looks. Eye candy. Anyhow I thought I would post my desktop so far today. I’d put it on the Unixporn site, but hey, then what would I post here? Show us all what your desktop looks like!

Addendum: I probably should mention what is actually running there. Gnome, Nautilus, xterms using vim for programming, transparent gnome-term running mocp for music, thunderbird email, pidgin instant messaging, and google chrome for browsing.

This past week I have gravitated to using Google-Chrome and Chromium more and more and I have to say I am loving it. Everything just works, and works rather snappy. The biggest contention I have with web browsing would be the results of Flash being a friggin hog and tending to crash the browser. I have not noticed as many problems with Flash under Chrom(e|ium). No slow downs, mouse interactions work, and multiple flash elements on a page do not destroy the performance.

I installed Chrome on my wife’s eeePC and she is just loving it. That is where she spends all her time now. “Amazing” she says! She confessed the other night to absolutely loving Google-Chrome.

What can I say? Google has done a bang up job with this browser. I am even using it more and more at work! My only gripe, originally, was with newly created tabs spawning next to the current tab I was in. I had been accustomed to the tabs spawning at the end of the tab row. There is a plugin to alter this behavior called tabby. What tabby does is move the newly created tab to the end of the tab row after it is created. The effect is noticeable as you see a bit of “jumpiness” in the tab bar. Not that distracting and you eventually begin to ignore. But, I must admit that I can see the benefit of tabs spawning next to the current one and I am tempted to go back to this behavior.

The latest builds of Firefox 3.6 seem to default to this behavior. To fix it you have to go into about:config and set browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent to false. Chances are you will get warnings that this may violate your warranty. I never knew there was a warranty for Firefox. Anyway, be aware that this warning has a checkbox that says don’t show me this warning anymore. If you don’t click it you will get that message every time you start Firefox.

Happy browsing!

So Linc posts about his VMware woes, and I too have experienced some mysterious issues these past couple of weeks, primarily with my Asterisk image. The asterisk server would mysteriously shut down with no warnings and nothing coherent I can see in the log files. To top it off, I had my main server image go haywire requiring a reboot on Monday and then it was just down the other morning. Again, no indication as to the problem has yet been discovered.

Imagine my surprise when my Meso battery would not charge. Recall that Linc had mentioned his Acer batter not charging for some reason a few episodes back on TLLTS. I had it plugged in at work yesterday and then all night last night. When I fired it up the battery was still dead. I have it on now and plugged in and it seems to be charging though, so I hope my issues are not the same as Linc. It’s at 15% now and climbing; maybe I am out of the woods.

Never-the-less, if you are having problems of late it’s probably Linc’s fault. Remember to remind him.

Topics include:

In today's podcast, dave provides audio proof that he has not died. After that he explains his absense, and talks about the SouthEast LinuxFest.

Links:

lottalinuxlinks.com linux user podcast 121 ogg vorbis format;

mediatomb;

mediatomb howto;

xiph quicktime components;

moving windows in gnu screen;

butt - broadcast using this tool; and

SouthEast LinuxFest.

Some times you just can’t win.

A while back I got some decent server hardware and decided I was going to migrate my main server to a VM, so I could make it more portable and more reliable, etc.. Well that worked out really well, for the most part, until lately.

I set up the 64 bit version of VMware Server 2.X, created a brand new VM server, got all my services running on it and all was well initially. For some reason, though, recently my VMs have just been randomly powered off. I cannot find anything in the logs, and the host machine is still running. This has happened a couple times to some other people as well. It’s very puzzling and quite frustrating to me. The only thing I have noticed about the problem is that, on my server, it seems that the VMs stay powered on longer if the management console is not running. When it *is* running, the VMs get shut down in a few hours (always when I am not around to watch them or restart them it seems) and the management interface gets stopped at the same time.

Searching the internet has been absolutely no help on this one, so if anyone has any hints, tips or information, please shoot me an email before I rip out what is left of my hair.

Yes, the news is out. Apple is releasing the iPad, to start shipping in 60 days. There has been much discussion amongst the peanut gallery on this one, but I, for one, am exceedingly happy about the release, although maybe not for the reasons you may think.

The Apple iPad (I keep wanting to type POD) is basically a 10 inch version of their iPod Touch, with some really nice new features. The iPad does all the standard web browsing, games, iPod Touch / iPhone apps (minus the phone part of course), and games that you would expect but it also includes iBook, a really slick looking ebook reader program and iWork Spreadsheets/Presentation/Document software, etc.. What I was most impressed with was the 3G access. For $15 a month you can get 250meg of 3G access from AT&T with NO CONTRACT! That alone almost makes it worth buying for me as Verizon wants to soak me for a 2 year contract and an extra $30 a month…

Do I want one of these myself? Well, I probably wouldn’t turn it down as I think Apple makes some good lookin’ hardware that does what _they_ want it to do well. There are a few problems I see with it though. It does not multitask. That’s right, want to play music while you are editing that spreadsheet or reading that ebook? Nope. No camera on there either. Would have been a killer app for them to have a built in camera for an iChat, or Skype or what have you. It needs a fold out keyboard. I don’t care how slick the touch screen keyboard is, it’s fundamentally flawed as you suck up screen realestate by using it. Lastly, no real OS on there. For most people this isn’t really a problem, but I would like something a little more than an appliance….

So why am I happy about the release? Well, in a word, competition. Now that Apple has set a “standard”, other manufacturers have something to aim for and above for their own product releases. I see manufacturers turning to Linux for this because it’s developer friendly, easier to shoehorn into embedded or strange / smaller devices, and the price is right. I hope to see a multitouch tablet with a full functioning and/or upgradeable/replaceable Linux distribution on it. I want it to have a rollout/foldout keyboard. I want it to have 802.11n and 3G available, and I want to see the price point at or below what the iPad is. Think this sounds too goo to be true? I think we are all going to be surprised. At least I hope so. And just to get things going, check out the TouchBook, which by the way was available BEFORE the iPad. I think we are headed in the right direction and I, for one, am eager to see what happens!

Won’t you join Klaatu in his multimedia quest? I noticed that the other day I failed to post some pertinent information regarding the multimedia sprint. Once again I failed Klaatu. I hope he can forgive me:

When: January 26th from 14:00-0600 Eastern Standard Time

Where: irc.binrev.net #media

What: Linux Multimedia “extra content” Sprint

Why: Linux multimedia users want raw materials, but there’s no reason every single Linux user should have to go out and do the same leg work as every other Linux user; let’s band together, find the free content, and share it in just a few easy-to-find and easy-to-download packages.

Hopefully that will vindicate me once more in his eyes. Klaatu is a harsh task master, that he is.

I come home from work Friday night to find the MythTV box running a browser looking up Thomas Jefferson on Wikipedia. My daughter was reading up on the President and decided to use the MythTV box instead of her eeePC. Back in the day we would have to pull the right encyclopaedia volume off the book shelf or get Mom or Dad to drive us to the Library for research. Kids these days have it so easy….

Well it is good to see that she is using the technology for purposes other than watching tv or catching up on anime episodes off Animefreak.tv. I must saying, watching full screen anime from Animefreak.tv is a wonderful experience on the mythbox. Why can it not be the same way for Hulu?