Planet TLLTS

Wow! Long time no post! I didn’t realize it had been so long. Lots of things have happened since I last wrote here. I had a little vacation time where I did pretty much nothing, I had a great belated birthday party that many of my friends attended, and I finally got my new NAS.

I really needed a new NAS. I keep running out of room on my old 500Gb NAS, which holds all my backups and media files and such. I have been putting off getting a new one for a long long time (I am a great procrastinator). Finally I broke down and picked up a Western Digital 1TB MyBook World Edition. I quite like it!

This NAS, priced around $170 depending on where you buy it, is actually pretty featureful. It offers cifs, afs and nfs filesharing, has optional ssh login ability and serves an itunes share and streaming media share. This NAS uses green technology, so not only does it automatically go into powersaving mode when not in use, but it uses a low power drive as well, so very little heat, no fan noise, and very low power draw. The gigabit ethernet affords decent speed on data transfers and the built in software is easy to setup and use and will let you get things like individual user accounts running quickly.

All in all, not a bad NAS for the price. In fact, this is probably the most inexpensive NAS I looked at with the featureset I needed. I have never yet been disappointed by Western Digital and that holds true on this purchase as well.

A while back I was talking about wireless problems with my wife’s Compaq laptop. That laptop’s wireless card has never worked well and I mentioned that I was now in the market for a USB wireless dongle for it as I couldn’t find a replacement mini pci-e wireless card that would work.

This weekend while laptop shopping I ran across a Belkin Wireless G USB Dongle at a Target store. I decided to bring it home and try it and it works perfectly. The only issue I had is I needed to remove the old wireless pci-e card because network manager kept switching between the two randomly.

If you are looking for a wireless USB dongle that works, at least, on Mint 8, this is it and it was only $30 at Target. Honestly, I should have just went this route long ago and forgone the hassle of trying different mini pci-e cards.

So you have some servers at home like I do. What do you put them on? Where do you put them? Well, for quite a while I had them sitting on a table, out in the open, right at ear level. Obviously this is not an optimum placement. In fact, it can get downright annoying with the noise and all. Servers really should be in a rack, but what if you dont have the space or can’t afford one? Enter the LackRack.

This website is a great resource for the LackRack, but essentially, it’s an Ikea “Lack” endtable, which just happens to be the correct size to fit rack-mountable equipment between the legs of the table.

In my case, my servers were a little longer than would fit inside the endtable version. Luckily enough, Ikea makes a “Lack” coffeetable too! This is what the LackRack people refer to as a LackRack Enterprise Edition As you can see, the Enterprise Edition has a middle rack drawer board that comes in handy for your first couple U worth of servers. It’s surprisingly sturdy too! For the grand sum of $20, I purchased my LackRack and set it up in just a few minutes and I think the results speak for themselves. The look is stunning in comparison to what it was before (wish I had pictures of the ugly mess to show) and the new rack cuts down on the noise considerably. I think having the servers closer to the floor and having a surface above them to deflect the sound helps quite a bit.

All in all, this is a wonderful way to inexpensively rack some equipment. Do check it out and if you get a LackRack for your house, share some pics!

So I sold my Mac Mini and my old Linux desktop machine burns up (cpu temp over 100 celcius). I need a new computer right? Well, the Best Buy run didn’t work out so well, so I started looking at other local stores for somewhere that had a decent laptop / desktop replacement that appeared to be, or mostly to be Linux compatible.

What I found, while browsing through store ads online was that Staples had a Dell Inspiron 15 for sale for just over $500. This machine sports a dual core proc at 2.2ghz, 15.6 inch widescreen with the Intel GMA 4500, 350gb hdd, 4gb ram and a Dell wireless card (rebadged Broadcom). The best part was I actually knew a friend who ordered 3 of these and had Ubuntu on at least one of them. Viola! Instant Linux Laptop!

Of course, these things are never that easy…

I ran out and picked one of these up and *just* as I was about to press enter to start formatting the drive, I notice that there is 1 dead pix3el in the middle right-hand side of the screen. Back it goes and I grab another (this one sans dead pixel). Mint 8 looks beautiful on this machine as I install it. Everything is peaches until I go for configuring the wireless. Now I am intending on using this machine as a desktop replacement, hooked to ethernet, but hey, if I have wireless, it should work. Right?

Well, I had a dandy of a time getting things to go like they are supposed to. Wireless on this laptop seems to be added under the “Hardware Drivers” or “Restricted Drivers” modules. What popped up was an STA driver and another that I cannot seem to remember at the moment. I, unfortunately, did NOT chose the STA driver. This started the maddening process where I fiddled with things and cussed at my computer for HOURS and could not get the wireless to work. After obtaining a sore throat that way, I decided to try the STA drivers. Well, once you installed the other drivers, whether or not you KEEP them installed, you CANNOT get the STA drivers installed. Each install failed, frustrating me even further. Eventually, I just did a clean reinstall and picked the STA drivers. Wireless worked perfectly after that.

After all that, it was time to put my desk back together with the new laptop. I really like the clean look of the desk now. Not as much screen realestate, but it’s tidy looking and feeling. I also purchased a Logitech wireless kb/mouse combo and I absolutely love it. And did I mention that this new machine absolutely smokes the previous two combined?

I named this monster Yeti, which is a re-use of the name of my Mac Mini. This machine, however, is black, so I guess it really is a Yeti of a different color. Hey, who says Yeti have to be white anyhow right?

More like goodbye…

Friday night I go to Best Buy to check out their 17″ Gateway laptop. I bring my trusty Mint Live cd so I can check things out real quick like before I buy the thing.

When I get into the store, I am, greeted by one of the blueshirts who asks if he can help. I explain I am there for a laptop, I brought my Live cd there to do a hardware compatability check before I buy it. He says just don’t install anything on the demo machines and I say no problem, it should only take me a coupe mins to check things out.

A few minutes later (still booting the live cd) the “supervisor” whiteshirt guy comes storming over to me saying “you can’t do that!”. Do what? Install “stuff” on computers… (Mind you I already have permission) I am not installing anything, just checking hardware compat for Linux – I need to buy a laptop. Supervisor says “Linux will run fine on it”. I look at the screen and I X is trying to start so I say it’s almost done. Supervisor steps in between me and laptop, rips out cd, pushes it at me and says “you can’t do this and if you don’t like it I can get someone to escort you out of the store”.

Needless to say I didn’t buy a laptop from Best Buy that night – or any other. What I *DID* do, when I got back home was to send nastymails to everyone at Best Buy I could find an email address for. I simply cannot deal with mean and nasty customer service people anymore and I do not have a problem writing emails to complain about it. Honestly, if this guy would have pulled his attitude with my wife while I was watching, someone would have had to bail me out of jail. You all know the type – I have even had the misfortune to have to work with the Joe Powertrip people like this before. Further, I did a little research on the Laptop I was unable to complete looking at in the store and found that there are some Linux issues with the i3 procs and perhaps even the Atheros wlan and Intel HD video too. This means that the “supervisor” guy was not only a butthead but was giving bad technical advice too. As a technical guy myself, that is not cool. If you don’t know the answer and do not understand the technology, at least be man enough to cop to it and go find the correct answer.

It’s unfortunate that this all went down like it did because I have a best buy store credit card and have previously been quite happy with my purchase experience there. It is, however, difficult to want to go shopping at a store that the manager threatened to throw you out of though.

Update: I was called on monday evening by the store manager who apologized profusely. He asked if I felt my experience had negatively impacted my decision to shop there in the future. No kidding, he really asked that.. DUH. Anyhow, I told the store manager there that I thought this guy should be, at least, retrained, that he was intentionally mean and that the technical people there should indeed be technical people. He asked if there was anything he could do to make my experience better. There isn’t, just make sure this crap doesn’t happen again. This morning I started getting emails from Best Buy Corporate. Who says the pen is not mightier than the sword?

I will probably not shop there, at least for a while, but maybe this whole debacle can turn out to be a win for Linux users who want to check hardware compatibility? Maybe…

Wow. Where do I even begin….

A little while back I was talking about getting a new desktop machine, or buying a laptop for a desktop replacement perhaps. Well, I procrastinated and, sure enough, my old desktop machine burned itself up on friday evening and would no longer stay running for more than a few seconds at a time. To top that off, I thought that I could use a little extra cash for my new machine so friday afternoon I decided to sell my mac mini, the only other desktop machine I had, and it sold almost immediately. Therefor, I had, in essence, no desktop machine by friday night. I had to reformat, reinstall OSX on the mini to get it shipped out on saturday morning.

I decided to go to best buy to check out this 17″ Gateway Laptop they had, for a desktop replacement. That turned out the be a debacle and giant time suck. More on this in a later post.

I ended up getting a new laptop (or should I say two) at Staples the next day (again, more in a later post), mailing off the Mac Mini, preping for a house warming party I was going to (made some of my yummie macaroni salad). Did some config of the new laptop and cleaning/reorg of my desk.

This is the good part. I went to friends house warming party and had a good time there for a few hours. Found out I really like home brewed Maple Mead. Mmmmmm Delicious!

Sunday is when I found out that the mechanic was going to rip me off. Took the car to the shop for a little rip in the sidewall of a tire and figured might as well do oil change, inspection (due next month), etc. at the same time. Well, the car’s tire was fine but needed a new brake hose and new shocks and parts not available until monday.

Monday had to mail my Nokia n800 I sold over the weekend and then wait around all day to pay for and pick up my car. I kept calling the garage to get updates on my car, as it was talking them en exceedingly long time, and had to deal with the snippy counter guy there. Finally put my Lackrack together to clean up my livingroom a bit too.

Whew, I am glad it’s tuesday

You know you’ve had a bad day when you have to use a DRILL to try and fix your wife’s laptop. Oh yeah.

My wife’s laptop has been having troubles with crappy wireless for the longest time. Well, I decided I was going to replace her card with a better one. It’s a Compaq Presario f730us laptop that has a mini pci-e wireless card in it. I searched around and found a nice intel card on Amazon and bought it. Well, when I put it in it wasn’t even detected. So, I tell the seller, thinking that it may just be a bad card, and he says it may need an HP branded card and sends me one of those to replace it with (nice seller btw). I get that card and get ready to try that and find one of the dang screws on the card is now striped and apparently welded in place. Nothing I have will get the friggin thing out so I had to resort to drilling off the screw cap just to remove the card. Then, you guessed it, the new card doesn’t get detected either. Friggin ComHPaq. So, the old card which drops packets like nobody’s business is back in place and the other 2 cards are on their way back for a refund.

My only alternative now, other than keeping her hard wired, is to find a USB wireless dongle. So, does anyone have any recommendations for a USB wireless card that’s Linux and wpa/wpa2 friendly and readily available somewhere (and inexpensive)?? Please shoot me an email and let me know!

Here in the USA it is tax time once again, and once again, the federal government owes me money. It’s funny how they don’t have to pay me interest on monies they owe me, but the reverse is not true, but I digress.

I have, on occasion, mentioned that my current desktop machine is a piece of junk. I have been using it for about 5 years now and I believe it is in dire need of a replacement. Since I am due a little scratch soon, I have given a little thought to replacing it. The real question, though, is whether to buy another desktop machine, or get a laptop that I can use as a desktop replacement. I am just not sure where to go on this one.

Generally speaking, desktop machines are or were faster and better equipped. They had better processors, more ram and bigger hard drives. Recently, though, I have been noticing that this is no longer the case except maybe in the case of multiple processors. I have seen some very reasonably priced multi-core laptops with 4gb of ram and very large hard drives for the same price as their comparably equipped desktop counterparts.

So, what are the pros and cons? Laptops as a desktop replacement can still be mobile if need be. Laptops as a desktop replacement really need a dock or stand and a separate kb/mouse imho and this is already the standard for desktops. Desktops can be not only multi-core, but multi-processor as well, so you can get access to more computing power. Desktops have separate components that are more easily replaceable/urgradable should the need arise, however, these days laptops are a rock-solid technology. Laptops do not need a separate display although they benefit as a desktop replacement from a secondary display as much as a regular desktop system does.

What is the answer? I really don’t know and would love to hear your opinions on this one. I am actually leaning towards a laptop as I spend most of my time on one already. My work desktop is actually a laptop in a dock with dual 22″ lcd screens. It’s a fantastic machine and has no problems even though I have left it running for well over a year now Do I really need another laptop though? I have 4 already, but none of them are beefy enough to really be my desktop machine, with the exception of my macbook, which does not like Linux so that doesn’t count.

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!