Joel Perry Productions

ok, so I woke up and now can’t get back to sleep.  nothing new, but this time I decided to do something instead of just laying there hoping to fall asleep before the sun rises.  Now, I thought that I already had this working, but apparently not… —edit okay, so I need to note I was doing these steps while writing this post and when I got to the step to reboot Fedora, step 6, I fell asleep.

I was and am currently using, a Fedora 12 VM from my laptop, now I thought I had the shared folders from the host OS (Win XP) setup, but could not find the mount point, so I just attempted to re-mount it.  fyi I’m using VirtualBox 3.1.2  so I attempted to remount the shared folder to a simple location…

$ sudo mount -t vboxsf documents /home/finndo/Documents/local

mount: unknown filesystem type ‘vboxsf’

so I do some Googling and come up with some interesting tidbits…

so, if you didn’t look at the link, here it is in a nutshell, to get the mount to work (yes I installed the VM additions, but did not notice the error…) please read the whole post before trying this, as there are some steps you may need to do a little differently and I have noted this, but not until after I list them!

ok, let me start from the beginning…

step by step instructions for getting shared folders to work in a Fedora 12 VM on VirtualBox (after you get fedora installed)

1. open a console window (I am a huge fan of Yakuake)
2. type “sudo yum install system-config-display”
3. give it your password (you may have to do this every time you type sudo)
4. type “sudo system-config-display”
5. this will open a window in your GUI (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, ICE, whatever) choose the options for your display (if using Yakuake you need to hit F12 to make the console window go away so you can see this new window)
6. type “sudo yum install gcc kernel kernel-devel kernel-headers”
7. restart the VM to boot with the newest kernel
8. goto the Devices menu and select install Guest additions
9. back to the console and type “sudo mount /cdrom /media”
10. type “sudo /media/VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run”
11. (special note, if you have already run the VBox Additions from the cd, skip steps 7-10 and  just type this “sudo /etc/init.d/vboxadd setup”
12. now I do not remember if I had to create the share for My Documents in VirtualBox or if it was there by default, but I have one, called “documents” and that is the one I am using in this example. so, type the following “sudo mkdir /mnt/shared-docs”
13. type “mount -t vboxsf documents /mnt/shared-docs”
14. then you can now access your Windows XP My Documents folder from your Fedora 12 install in the /mnt/shared-docs folder!!!

Really not that hard, but nowhere in the documentation for VirtualBox does it tell you that you have to do all of that!

Now, you can type “su -” and give it your password, then you do not have to use “sudo” at all for the entire process.  you may ask why I do it then, and it is because I work on linux and unix systems for a living (or at least I am trying to) and for security reasons they tell you to never su to root (become the root user) as it is too easy to type an accidentally command in that will make the entire system irreversibly broken (with out restoring from a backup) and since I have been logged into some servers that are used in the monitoring/maintenance of the space shuttle and international space station, so making one of those stop working for several hours or more is a really bad idea! therefore you sudo every command you need to run as root instead of becoming root, gets annoying at times, but almost eliminates the chance of accidental termination of your employment!

Ok, so a note, I am running this Fedora 12 VM on a single core laptop with 2GB of Ram (1.5GB given to Fedora, and nothing running in the host except the VM) and when I ran step 5, it practically halted my system and took almost 30 minutes (part of the reason why I fell asleep) it would say it was downloading a 8.6 meg file and take 14 minutes to do so, at 858Mb/s (which is impossible I know, but that is what it did and said) anyway, the main reason I did this, is that I had downloaded some other Fedora .iso files and filled my Virtual HDD and needed to get them off!!

So, now you know… and as we all know… Knowing is half the battle!

[finndo@fedora12KDE yum.repos.d]$ sudo mount -t vboxsf documents /home/finndo/Documents/local

mount: unknown filesystem type ‘vboxsf[finndo@fedora12KDE yum.repos.d]$ sudo mount -t vboxsf documents /home/finndo/Documents/local

mount: unknown filesystem type ‘vboxsf’

More from Finndo

• FreeBSD and VMWare
• couple of updates to the site…
• Some site changes

not too much content this time (unless I get carried away again).  couple of neat articles I read today (not the most trusted sources for news, but you have to make your own decisions… (both the things I started this post to talk about came from blogs.zdnet.com ) (another note, all links on my site “SHOULD” open in new windows, for some reason they never implemented “open link in a new tab” feature to HTML, or I just haven’t found it yet)

VirtualBox 3.1 - has been released with it’s new “big” feature… “teleport”.  some people might recognize this as being extremely similar to IBM’s Power System’s Live Partition Mobility.  in a nutshell this means:

Partition mobility provides the ability to move a logical partition from one system to another.  Live (or active) partition mobility allows you to move a running logical partition, including its operating system and applications, from one system to another.  The applications do not need to be shut down.  Inactive partition mobility allows you to move a powered off (or deactivated) logical partition from one system to another.

Live Partition Mobility
Live partition mobility allows you to migrate running AIX and Linux partitions and their hosted applications from one physical server to another without disrupting the infrastructured services.  The migration operation, which takes just a few seconds, maintains complete transactional integrity.  The migration transfers the entire system environment, including processor state, memory, attached virtual devices, and connected users.

(actually quoted from the IBM training manual for IBM course AU78 “System p LPAR and Virtualization II: Implementing Advanced Configurations”  a training class I took in July of this year) and so it goes on… (I guess I just killed the “no long post” part at the beginning…)  This has to be the coolest thing I have ever seen/witnessed/done in my life.  I setup an LPAR (logical partition) on a System p server, installed AIX 6.1 on it, then while another person in the training class was logged in and doing something in the server, I migrated it to another physical machine in less than 15 minutes with less than 5 seconds of down time (monitored with a CPU and HDD activity monitors running on the virtual server and a custom script that basically played the worm game and changed colors when the host system changed so we knew when it had actually made the switch)

Words cannot describe watching a multi-gigabyte installation of a server migrate to another physical box and keep working with less than 5 seconds of down time over the course of 12-15 minutes.  I am guilty of not having checked the total used size of the data drive, so I do not know how large the transfer was).  now to have this option in a freeware app that I can run on my Quad-core at home is very cool.  Especially since VirtualBox is currently my VM-app of choice.  Don’t get me wrong, I do/have used Virtual PC from Microsoft quite a good bit, but the configuration options and multiple VHD file format compatibility make VirtualBox the winner in that contest hands down.  Also, I have nothing against VMWare personally; however it is intensely confusing to go from Virtual PC to a VMWare workstation application and figure out what is going on and how to set it up without going back to “what already works… and is simple to use.”   Press release for VirtualBox 3.1

ok, after over 550 words, lets move on to the second half of my post (definitely not going to be a quick post… but then I always have a lot to say about stuff…)

OS and Web Browser share reports… Windows XP and Vista and MAC OS X are down, Win7 and Linux are up.  Firefox and IE8 usage are up, IE6 and IE7 are down, and everybody else, well no comment was made… original article is here on ZDNet - FYI how/where this info came from is sited on the ZDNet page.

right few comments about the above, first interesting how Firefox #’s are combined for all versions, does that mean Mozilla does a better job getting people to upgrade? or that Firefox users are less likely to fall very far behind on versions? same thing goes for the Safari #’s. yes Safari and Chrome are mentioned in the #’s, but no comments were made as to their rise or fall.

(completely unrelated, but I am listening to Pandora right now on my Sprint HTC Touch and they just played “Coloured Rain” by Slade, whom I have never heard before, at least not knowingly.  They are a British Rock band from the 70’s and I could have sworn it was The Beatles when it started playing…) (a note on that note, I Bing’d “wikipedia the beatles” and on the first page I got the Wikipedia page on the Beatles in the following languages, but not English… in order: sco, simple, nl, fr, ro, it.  I know what all of those are, except ro (Russian? it doesn’t look Russian)…  there were other results, including 2 Beatles albums’ pages on Wikipedia in English…)

More from Finndo

• couple of updates to the site…
• bringing the past to the future….
• continuing on in June/July 2009…

After this post I should catch up to the here and now pretty quick…

right, so I had (finally) Ubuntu running with all the hardware working, and started messing with wine and trying to get World of Warcraft and DDO to run.  no good that was.  both were requiring the newest video drivers from AMD (I think that was what was wrong, never quite figured it out…) the games would both load but would fail at some point, and have other issues… including not allowing me to login or play…   Well the video driver issue ended up being that (yes it did install fine) the on-board video on the laptop had just (and I do mean within a couple of weeks/a month or two) been taken out of the newest updates, and had been placed in the “legacy drivers” list.  mean while, before I actually figured this out, was installing dot net (nearly every version) into wine, and flash, and java, and all kinds of stuff.  I Was getting really excited, the laptop was working great, even if not with the OS I really wanted.  especially since I could not find this model on the inet anywhere as being functional in linux. (the wireless and audio is what normally fails to function, and I had both working in more than one flavor of linux)

then one day at work a co-worker was looking into selling an old IBM T40 laptop and we were shocked to see people paying $150 or more for them.  so I decided what the heck… I put my laptop on Craig’s list one after noon about 3pm.  I had 4 emails and 3 phone calls before 8pm that night.  decided to sell it to the first caller, they wanted win XP, so I wiped it (oh well, good learning experience) and set it up for them, then they had to postpone coming to get it, because of a dinner party they had forgotten about, then they were not sure if they could get it, and told me to not hold it for them anymore.  well I did not get it sold, and now had win XP barebonez’d on it and login ID’s setup for people who would never see it, let alone use it.

oh well, not sure if I mentioned this or not, but I started having some wierd HDD errors on my semi-new desktop PC.  failed writes, ticking noises while the drives were spinning, drives disappearing, then coming back after rebooting… it looks like I may have 2 or 3 bad HDDs.  I get all the data moved off the Seagate that was reporting bad sectors and I get an RMA setup, quick and painless… now I just need to find a box, or “original shipping packaging”  anyone who has not had this on hand and has had to look for it will know.  it’s not real easy to find a custom fitted HDD packaging that perfectly fits the box you plan on sticking it in, and has a minimum of 2″ of foam on all sides.  So I decided to ask around at work… I also submitted a tech help request with ECS, the manufacturer of my motherboard, as I was having both video problems AND HDD issues at this point.

on to the next issue that was going on…

so I had to go to Pittsburgh for training for work, 1 week, 2 semi-high level virtual server training courses taught by an IBM instructor (AU72 AU78 and AU73 the AIX Virtual I/O Server training.  I’ll check at work tomorrow and will update if wrong on those –updated).  had an awesome time in Pittsburgh, got to meet the team I was working with virtually, and learned a tonne of stuff. (I prefer the metric tonne to the American ton, so much more useful, and a conversation piece when used in writing… pictures are available on picasaweb there are not a whole lot of images (50 something), I was working (and no I did not take any images of where I was working, but there is a hint about for whom I do work.  sorry folks I might slip somewhere, but company policy severely “suggests” that I do not disclose anything about my employment that is not necessary…) most of the time (working that is, I got distracted and used one of my parenthetical explanations that I am overly fond of and are truly not necessary, nor wanted by most.  HOWEVER, and this is the good part, I am writing this, not you, and you are not paying me to do so!! SO!! I will use excessively long descriptions/mental overture if you will, at my discretion.  I sure hope Wordpress has a good spell checker, cuz I make up words all the time)  umm… now where was I?

oh yeah, I was working most of the time, and so only took a few pictures, now that I no longer have a semi-pro DSLR (Canon 20D) I am stuck taking pic’s with a semi-crummy Kodak 6mp point-and-shoot.  Back to the point.. The weekend I got back from Pittsburgh, and I had to move, across the hall from a nice 1150-ish sq ft 2 BR apt to a kinda cramped 950-ish sq ft 1 BR apt.   Things got switched around, and now my Sheeva Plug fails 80% of the system checkpoints during bootup (not that I blame the move, just that I had no problems with it before this).  it still functions (ie. turns on and I can log in via the console), except the network port interface is kaput… (defined as “ka·put also ka·putt (kä-p t, -p t, k-) adj. Informal. Incapacitated or destroyed.” at www.thefreedictionary.com/kaput )  (fyi I still have not gotten around to reflashing the ROM on it, which I learned back in early june, is necessary to allow the usage of SD Media Cards.) 

HA! not sure what I talked about in this one, was a little distracted (doing some things on my desktop in preparation to RMA the MB…) but I’ll go ahead and post it as I hit 1k words.

More from Finndo

• couple of updates to the site…
• bringing the past to the future….
• just some interesting news I found online…