Today I’ve gone to our collocation to replace ancient DAT72 drive with not so ancient SDLT. Haven’t been there for a couple of months. And as always I was curious about what others have in new racks. Today I have spotted some F5 equipment with asset tags by facebook just in the middle of my path to our rack. This bloody things have pink f5 logos the size of 1U shining, hard not to spot.
I’ve installed alfresco on Gentoo, used Gentoo HOWTO . Only major problem which I encountered was with not finding jdbc MySQL driver. I’ve tried to use script from the HowTo, but it wasn’t working.
My Solution was to rebuild jdbc driver ( the script broken it ) ( emerge -av jdbc-mysql ) and then I’ve done a simple find /usr -name jdbc-mysql.jar and linked the file inside tomcats lib ( ln -s `find /usr -name jdbc-mysql.jar` /usr/share/tomcat-6/lib/jdbc-mysql.jar )
Found a quick howto to setup JMeter which will launch me in the world of properly tested web applications.
After, not much over 1 year, I am retiring my Media Vault .
Having a network attached storage is a briliant idea. I am staying with it. It’s just the Media Vault product.
Slow death. After half a year, a small fan has broken and since then it became loud, I have contacted HP to get it replaced, but they asked me to ship the whole unit to them, even when I was perfectly fine to replace it my self. I said ˇNo, thank you˝. That was my first experience with HP Support for dummies (home user). Months later, I have moved to a new place with a dedicated computer closet and I bought a proper server, the ML110. From there, I started experimenting with OpenSolaris, which with ZFS and NFS - SMB sharing, it’s soo much better and extremely flexible solution.
Two 750GB drives later I have my first Sol(aris)NAS. Very nice creature and actually faster than the MV. Last week I started migrating data on to the SolNas, and today I’ve finished migrating clients to it. Nice!
MV is switched off, my energy consumption lost a 35W sucker and I have no idea what to do with it now. Just gonna leave it where it is. Maybe you want it ?
After replacing damned dell keyboard with something usable, I had real urge to replace the mouse as well. I’ve got used to Logitech Marble Trackball and MX900 mouse ergonomic designs, so standard mouse was actually putting a lot of pain in my wrist.
It looks like symmetric mice just don’t work with my wrist any more.
As I like to play a good game from time to time, I have started to look for some nice gaming mouse. “Once goats death(die) ” I had a look at Logitech G9 and G5 - they didn’t really convinced me. Brief look at Microsoft range, caught my eye on the mouse which they made in cooperation with Razer, it was really good on my wrist but kind of old now.
I have decided that I want a Razer mouse. At that point I was really struggling. There was no shop on Tottenham Court Road which had any Razers. I had to decide with knowledge based on reviews read on the Internet. DAMN! For some time I was convinced that Lachesis would be the best mouse for me. But reading reviews pushed me away, it was apparently a very good high spec mouse, but unfortunately - symmetric design. So I had to resort to a lower model and DeathAdder started to grow on me.
Now I just love that mouse. It’s great performance, slides like on butter. Fits my palm perfectly, no strain on my wrist. Even side buttons just work! under Gnome and FIrefox. This is brilliant, as I have previously spent hours to get MX900 up with all its buttons.
Oh and I thought that the lights on the mouse are going to be annoying. Fortunately, they are not. Maybe because I have the Guild Wars edition, which has orange instead of blue lights, this is acceptable.
I have downloaded Foresight Linux 2 with a hope to see some really cool and up to date Linux distribution.
Yes, it has GNOME 2.22 which just came out ( was it yesterday ? ) and yes, this is cool. But if you are matured computer user, you have your favourite tools. Naming a few for me: gkrellm and unison(this one is new for me). Now, gkrellm is longer on the marked than most of the current cool distributions, Unison is not a toddler as well. They are both missing from Foresight Linux … not only standard installation but also the software repository … c’mon!
I have also learned that Foresight is based on rPath as well as Asterisk Now…
I am worried that I will have to ditch it , like I have done with Asterisk Now, rPath and conary is not really production mature! - at least for me.
Didn’t intended to do any shopping today, but I ended up buying a few things.
Headphones from Sennheiser , the HD 415 which are replacing my ancient Phillips HP140. This is because old ones started to leave pieces of some black coating on my head … and they were shit from the beginning. HD 415 didn’t break the bank and still feel and sound good.
Another item on the list is Microsoft Comfort Curve Keyboard 2000. Since I have started to use my desktop not only for gaming, I was really hating the standard Dell Keyboard, which it was delivered with - feel on the keys is just plain wrong and many times you have to use a lot of force to push a key down. I have some wireless Belkin keyboard, but it is shit as well - eats(doesn’t transmit) letters and doesn’t have the responsiveness. So, now I have a nice low profile MS keyboard, I am still getting used to curved line of keys. The new keyboard has some multimedia keys present, I have been successful to map couple of them to the right functionality. But I still have problems with getting Back and Forward to actually work in FF - they have their own key codes so it is not Just Works (c) like with IBM keyboards ( they map them as alt+left and alt+right ). Also Banshee is refusing to react to Play/Pause button mapping.
I have finally bought a remote controlled mains socket switch. It’s just 5 quid and saves me diving behind a sofa to switch off my kit for the night. Yes, I have started to switch off all my equipment at the wall socket, this crap is using about 55W while on standby!!!!
Virtualization
Due to server hardware refresh coming at work, I am investigating routes which we can take, one of the new ones is going virtual. It has couple of advantages like High Availability, and Fail Over which are very important these days ( users complain if their services are not available 100% )
So far I have covered VMWare Server and Infrastructure products. Where I like features of Infrastructure and price and ease of use of Server.
Now it’s time for XEN. From the beginning it looks very bare. Not like entirely integrated VMWare software, XEN is just the basic core and you need tools to use it and these come in plenty. Now I am playing with what came shipped with OpenSuSe. But just now I’ve briefly read on ganeti and I am impressed.
Linux KVM, hmm, I don’t have much to say for it. From what I’ve seen it’s not good for hosting MS Windows guest systems.
SAN
This is kinda strange, I know what are they, how they work, even used it in some testing. But I never had opportunity to work with a real, expensive solution. So far, Compellent is looking like the sort of things which I might consider installing. The only thing which worries me is license cost as well as resilience of a controller. If I have half a dozen servers connected to that bastard, they all die with it.
Routing
I am also in the router/firewall upgrade bucket. Choice is hard here, part of me wants a Cisco and the other one wants something cheaper but as good as Cisco. No part of me wants a Juniper, they are cheaper but from what I have seen they are awkward to work with. I’ve came across Vyatta, looks solid and as I am testing it, I can not find any limitations which would cross it out. But I don’t like it’s name, it does not flow on the keyboard right ( definitely not as well as my yllq )
This was suppose to be a long post describing the differences and similarities of Linux distributions to other software…
But I just want to say that you should have a look at Mac OS and Ubuntu, I’ve notice they are bloody similar in their current market and … ambitions.
They are both good on a home desktop, they can do as a home server ( they have server editions ). They also lack hardcore enterprise solutions.
Read me