Joel Perry Productions

Getting ready to setup my PC as a VMWare Server, got a new WD Caviar Black 500GB 32MB cache Internal drive so I can dump all my files on it to clean off a pair of 250GB drives to run the VM’s on.  I learned a long time ago you want different HDD’s for each VM if they are to be active, as the slowest part of a computer these days are the HDD’s and the last thing you want is more than one OS trying to run off the same HDD. Would be nice if I could talk myself into the cost of a few SSDs.  Below are some links I am finding while I research that sound useful or interesting, not all are exactly pertaining to what I am trying to do, some may be helpful with things I am going to do after I get it setup, so I’ll be adding things to this post as I find them, to build up some information links for setting up my VMWare server.

1. a forum post where someone describes exactly what they install as their host linux machine to run the VMWare server on, unfortunately this is for CentOS, which is okay, just not my preferred Linux distro.  and unfortunately according to VMWare’s website, Ubuntu, CentOS, and RHEL are the only supported Linux Distro’s… I wonder while they do not support FreeBSD as well? oh well, we shall see how it goes.
2. a great article on setting up Ubuntu JeOS, although JeOS is designed for being set up as a virtual machine, I want to see if it can be used as the host OS for VMWare Server also, and will be the first Host OS I will try when my new drive arrives. (that should be interesting, I’ll try and keep good notes)
3. Using Kernel Mode Virtual Machine on any Linux Distro with kernel 2.6.20 or newer.  Also not what I was looking for, but a great alternative, this is a guide book giving step by step instructions for setting it up and installing your guest OS, including command line inputs for setup.
4. setting up an IPCop Virtual Machine to manage your internet traffic, of course now I need to go and figure out exactly what it does (I can guess, but like to know more details).  Still not exactly what I started looking for, but these are the things I have been finding while looking and are still useful.  Setting up IPCop like this is definitely something I would be interested in doing to simplify my network protection; although I have a Sheeva Plug computer that I purchased specifically to do this, and just never got around to setting it up. (Still have to get it flashed to a new version on it’s NAND rom so the SD cards can work, so I can put a decent sized storage card on their to do all I want to do with it.)

(must be a problem with IE8 that is preventing me from inserting the web links, I’ll update this post later from Google Chrome and if it doesn’t work, then I’ll try it from Fedora and see if it works then.  Until then, I am sorry but I will not be posting referrence links to everything I type.)

(well everything works fine from Google Chrome under Windows 7, as you can see from the improvements to this post.  Unless of course you are seeing it for the first time now…  :)

More from Finndo

• FreeBSD and VMWare
• couple of updates to the site…
• fantastic blog post on why the iPad will fail

start off with some non-techie stuff first…

I head back to see my surgeon next Monday,  where he will tell me that in another week or two I should start putting some weight on my leg (toe touch, or partial weight bearing?) when at my PT.  I am also hoping he will tell me it is okay to get my incision wet, as it has been making it very difficult to take showers!

ok, on to the good stuff.

So, I am not at home and do not have my desktop machine available for use for the last week, I have been going through withdrawal…  but having to work on someone else’s machine, and my wife’s laptop (I think I mentioned before, I gave her mine, and sold her old one) has taught me one important lesson, why I prefer Linux.

My number one reason for preferring Linux over Windows is system maintenance.  What do I mean? well, I mean keeping everything up to date, this latest round of Adobe patching should make this make sense to everyone.  I don’t use Acrobat on my Linux machines for this reason.  However; back to the point, when I need to check for updates on my Linux machine I open Yakuake with a quick hit of F12 and type “sudo yum update” and it comes back and tells me every single thing installed on my system that has an update available, period, end of statement.  On windows, I have to launch 5-8 different apps, find their “check for updates” button/link and wait for the results (I have learned by doing this that OpenOffice.org does not notify you of a new version being released, only if there are updates for your version.  example, I have 3.1 installed, and 3.2 is now available.  clicking the check for updates menu option tells my “There are no available updates for this version” (maybe not word for word, but that is just about what it says).  I run windows update, Acrobat Update, Java update, Picasa update, Chrome update, Firefox update, and on and on… (yes I know there is an Adobe Updater, but I don’t know how to initiate it in Windows, and never cared enough to look it up, but now that I have mentioned it I sure I found instructions and have put a link to them here).

Simple and easy to manage, most distros even let you run their package manager and it has a button to click to check for updates for your system, making it easier and more time consuming all at once to do the same thing.  (Yakuake is always running and it takes me about 1.5 seconds to type that line into the terminal, it takes a lot longer to load the package manager from the application menu and then click the check for updates button, but you don’t have to type that way!)

The actual GUI interface for Windows an Linux and even MAC are so similar these days, that I don’t care which I am using as far as that is concerned.  I have come to the understanding that there will always be applications/games for an OS, other than the one I am using, that I want to use/play (take iPhone for example, they have the best Air Traffic Controller game I have played, and I’ve hunted those down and played quite a number of them, but I don’t own anything made by Apple, and probably won’t ever, unless the 2nd gen iPad totally rocks… but I will be getting an Android Tablet this year (possibly the Notion Ink Adam, or the HTC Google Chrome OS tablet), so I still probably won’t get an iPad).  My concern at this point, as I spend more and more time as a Unix Admin is maintenance.  The system I use at home needs to be practically maint free, as most Linux and Unix machines are, they will run for years without being touched by an admin, the best I know of are an AIX Server and a OpenVMS server, the AIX server has been running since 1991 and has never been patched, updated, reconfigured, or messed with in any way.  It is setup to contact a NIM server for logins, so no new users have ever been added to it, it has never crashed, never lost power, never been rebooted.  That to me is the greatest achievement of humankind (in technology anyways, and some of these companies need to take a look at the AIX OS and learn something from it!!!).  The other machine, the OpenVMS machine has been running since before 1994, but has not been patched, never been upgraded, never been rebooted, since 1994.  now I know next to nothing about OpenVMS, and have not personally logged into the machine itself, but a friend and co-worker of mine used to be the sole admin for the OpenVMS machines at that company and although that one is the only one like this, it is still running today without interference from humans.  I am sure some other machines are out there doing the same, but these are two that I know.  The longest Windows Server I have heard of running without rebooting or crashing was about 2.5 – 3 years, after which the hardware components in the server failed and the machine was replaced.  Some people have told me about Windows servers being up for 4 years and then being restarted by some new guy, but I have no validation of it and they could not give me a more exact time frame.

not sure if I made a compelling argument or not, but I need some medication and to go prop my leg up, so I am done here.  Also expecting UPS sooner or later for an over night supersave shipment… and it takes me 5 mins to get downstairs…  :)

More from Finndo

• couple of updates to the site…
• The first post, one which may disapear forever…
• just a couple of random thoughts…

Ok, so first, sorry I have not posted in a while.  First I was out of the continental united states for a couple of weeks in December, then had some pet problems in early January, followed up with breaking the crap out of my leg January 16th. I cracked my Tibia clean through about 3 inches above my ankle and then the tibia split up the bone about 6 inches, followed by cracking my fibula clean through just above the split in my tibia.  I have a lovely 8″ metal plate in my leg with 15 screws now.  so I do actually have a couple of good reasons for not posting.  I just started feeling somewhat better, I got my appetite back this past Saturday and my pain is mostly manageable even though I rarely find a comfortable position to sit/lay. in

Happier news…

Sprint is finally getting an Android phone with the new 1GHz SnapDragon processor by Qualcomm (extra cool it is capable of going up to 1.5 GHz if I remember correctly). The HTC Super-sonic. Hopefully late March, early April!! finally! I’ve been waiting since October…

Next up, back to my lovely PC, most everything seems to be working just fine now, I am running with the default BIOS settings and it works at least; however the PC sits on the BIOS POST image for almost 2 minutes before it actually starts POSTing.  Not sure what to do about that, I think I need to wait for the next BIOS update to fix that, but for now… it works.

So, I used a bootable CD with Paragon Defrag on it to Defrag my Windows 7 boot HDD and then used the Fedora 12 KDE x64 Live CD to install Fedora on the HDD by shrinking my Win7 partition by 100Gigs and then installed Fedora on it.

Now, the next time I booted into Windows 7 I got a message that my copy of Windows was not Genuine.  Not sure what’s up with that, but I haven’t done anything about it, and I have not gotten the message again.

Now back to Fedora… I added the proprietary drivers for my Motherboard’s ATI Radeon 3300HD in an attempt to try to use wine to play Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) and a couple of other things, mostly some older games…  after rebooting, I no longer get a GUI, just a blank black screen and about 8 lines down a blinking cursor.  I can type, I can hit enter, but it does not respond.  This has been going on since January 5th or so.  Today I found out that Fedora has Virtual terminals just like FreeBSD, so very cool, I can at least get to a prompt today.  Now I cannot find any assistance online for configuring the ATI drivers so I can get them to work.  I know that a couple of versions ago they changed the command to configure the drivers, but I can’t find any helpful, current, information for this.  I am lucky I found the aticonfig command again.  I think I can figure it out from here though.  It just bugs me that the only info I could find said not to use the drivers, then if you go to Wine’s website they tell you if you don’t use the proprietary drivers that you can expect your games not to run well.  What a pain. (not as big of a pain as my leg though)  after searching for “aticonfig linux” I found some more info…

Will try and update again this week on how things are going, I am also working on my taxes so who knows… right now I am doing it on TurboTax.com but I think I will try a couple of others before I submit, even though I have used Turbo Tax for 15 years or so.

More from Finndo

• couple of updates to the site…
• getting my PC to function…
• just a couple of random thoughts…