Linux

You are currently browsing articles tagged Linux.

Technology Short Take #17

Monday, November 28, 2011 in Linux, Macintosh, Microsoft, Networking, Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 1 comment

Welcome to Technology Short Take #17, another of my irregularly-scheduled collections of various data center technology-related links, thoughts, and comments. Here’s hoping you find something useful!

Networking

  • I think it was J Metz of Cisco that posted this to Twitter, but this is a good reference to the various 10 Gigabit Ethernet modules.
  • I’ve spoken quite a bit about stretched clusters and their potential benefits. For an opposing view—especially regarding the use of stretched clusters as a disaster avoidance solution—check out this article. It’s a nice counterpoint, especially from the perspective of the network.
  • Anyone know anything about sFlow?
  • Here’s a good post on VXLAN that has some useful information. I’d just like to point out that VXLAN is really only intended to address Layer 2 communications “within” a vApp or a collection of VMs (perhaps a single organization’s VMs), and doesn’t do anything to address Layer 3 routing/accessibility for clients (or “consumers”) attempting to connect to those systems. For that, you’ll still need—at least today—technologies like OTV, LISP, and others.
  • A quick thought that I’m still exploring: what’s the impact of OpenFlow on technologies like VXLAN, NVGRE, and others? Does SDN eliminate the need for these technologies? I’d be curious to hear your thoughts.

Servers/Operating Systems

  • If you’ve adopted Mac OS X Lion 10.7, you might have noticed some problems connecting to older servers/NAS devices running AFP (AppleTalk Filing Protocol). This Apple KB article describes a fix. Although I’m running Snow Leopard now, I was running Lion on a new MacBook Pro and I can attest that this fix does work.
  • This Microsoft KB article describes how to extend the Windows Server 2008 evaluation period. I’ve found this useful for Windows Server 2008 instances in the lab that I need for longer 60 days but that I don’t necessarily want to activate (because they are transient).

Storage

  • Jason Boche blogged about a way to remove stubborn hosts from Unisphere. I’ve personally never seen this problem, but it’s nice to know how to address it should it occur.
  • Who would’ve thought that an HDD could serve as a cache for an SSD? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Normally, that would probably be the case, but as described here there are certain instances and ways in which using an HDD as a cache for an SSD can improve performance.
  • Scott Drummonds wraps up his 3 part series on flash storage in part 3, which contains information on sizing flash storage. If you haven’t been reading this series, I’d recommend giving it a look.
  • Scott also weighs in on the flash as SSD vs. flash on PCIe discussion. I’d have to agree that interfaces are important, and the ability of the industry to successfully leverage flash on the PCIe bus is (today) fairly limited.
  • Henri updated his VNXe blog series with a new post on EFD and RR performance. No real surprises here, although I do have one question for Henri: is that your car in the blog header?

Virtualization

  • Interested in setting up host-only networking on VMware Fusion 4? Here’s a quick guide.
  • Kenneth Bell offers up some quick guidelines on when to deploy MCS versus PVS in a XenDesktop environment. MCS vs. PVS is a topic of some discussion on the vSpecialist mailing list as they have very different IOPs requirements and I/O profiles.
  • Speaking of VDI, Andre Leibovici has two articles that I wanted to point out. First, Andre does a deep dive on Video RAM in VMware View 5 with 3D; this has tons of good information that is useful for a VDI architect. (The note about the extra .VSWP overhead, for example, is priceless.) Andre also has a good piece on VDI and Microsoft Outlook that’s worth reading, laying out the various options for Outlook-related storage. If you want to be good at VDI, Andre is definitely a great resource to follow.
  • Running Linux in your VMware vSphere environment? If you haven’t already, check out Bob Plankers’ Linux Virtual Machine Tuning Guide for some useful tips on tuning Linux in a VM.
  • Seen this page?
  • You’ve probably already heard about Nick Weaver’s new “Uber” tool, a new VM alignment tool called UBERAlign. This tool is designed to address VM alignment, a problem with how guest file systems are formatted within a VMDK. For more information, see Nick’s announcement here.
  • Don’t disable DRS when you’re using vCloud Director. It’s as simple as that. (If you want to know why, read Chris Colotti’s post.)
  • Here’s a couple of great diagrams by Hany Michael on vCloud Director management pods (both public cloud and private cloud management).
  • People automatically assume that “virtualization” means consolidating multiple workloads onto a single physical server. However, virtualization is really just a layer of abstraction, and that layer of abstraction can be used in a variety of ways. I spoke about this in early 2010. This article (written back in March of 2011) by Brad Hedlund picks up on that theme to show another way that virtualization—or, as he calls it, “inverse virtualization”—can be applied to today’s data centers and today’s applications.
  • My discussion on the end of the infrastructure engineer generated some conversations, which is good. One of the responses was by Aaron Sweemer in which he discusses the new (but not new) “data layer” and expresses a need for infrastructure engineers to be aware of this data layer. I’d agree with a general need for all infrastructure engineers to be aware of the layers above them in the stack; I’m just not convinced that we all need to become application developers.
  • Here’s a great post by William Lam on the missing piece to creating your own vSEL cloud. I’ll tell you, William blogs some of the coolest stuff…I wish I could dig in as deep as he does in some of this stuff.
  • Here’s a nice look at the use of PowerCLI to help with the automation of DRS rules.
  • One of my projects for the upcoming year is becoming more knowledgeable and conversant with the open source Xen hypervisor and Citrix XenServer. I think that the XenServer Design Handbook is going to be a useful resource for that project.
  • Interested in more information on deploying Oracle databases on vSphere? Michael Webster, aka @vcdxnz001 on Twitter, has a lengthy article with lots of information regarding Oracle on vSphere.
  • This VMware KB article describes how to enable centralized logging for vCloud Director cells. This is particularly important for HA environments, where VMware’s recommended HA strategy involves the use of multiple vCD cells.

I guess I should wrap it up here, before this post gets any longer. Thanks for reading this far, and feel free to speak up in the comments!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Some OSS with my Mac, Part 1: Synergy

Friday, November 18, 2011 in Linux, Macintosh by slowe | 2 comments

(This is Part 1 of a two-part series on some open source software I’ve incorporated into my home office setup, which is primarily Mac-based. Part 2 is here.)

Since my move to Denver a couple months ago, I’ve had a home office large enough to do a full multi-computer setup. Space constraints in my home office in Raleigh-Durham had prevented me from being able to fully take advantage of the multiple laptops that I have. So, with the new space in Denver, I set out to go full-bore. At the time, I had a late 2006 era 15″ MacBook Pro, a mid-2009 MacBook Pro 15″, and a Dell Latitude E6400 running Ubuntu Linux. (I’ve since replaced the late 2006 15″ MacBook Pro with an early 2011 13″ MacBook Pro.)

Of course, the real challenge with a multi-computer setup is the need for a shared keyboard and mouse, and that was the first challenge I had to tackle. The answer was found in Synergy, an open source project that provides a shared keyboard and mouse across multiple computers.

For those unfamiliar with Synergy, here’s a little background: one computer (known as the “server”) hosts the keyboard and mouse. The server’s keyboard and mouse are shared with other computers referred to as “clients”. The server/client designation makes sense to me now, but I recall at the time it seemed a bit odd.

I messed around with a few different distributions or variations of Synergy (like SynergyKM) for a little while before realizing that only the “real” version of Synergy was going to give me the flexibility that I wanted. For example, I wanted a bit more control over how and when the cursor jumped from screen to screen, and none of the prepackaged versions of Synergy offered customizable controls, even though the underlying Synergy package did.

From this Synergy downloads page, I downloaded the Mac and Linux versions of the 1.4.x beta version of Synergy. Despite my best efforts, I could not make it work. Keystroke mappings were off, the screen switching was intermittent, and it was buggy. Finally, I dropped back to the latest stable release at the time (1.3.6). Using the exact same configuration files, the 1.3.6 release worked flawlessly the first time. Nice!

Here’s my setup:

  • One of the MacBook Pro laptops (the 15″ 2009 MBP originally, now the 13″ 2011 MBP) is the Synergy server. It sits in the “center” of the three computers on my desk. It has a 24″ Apple Cinema display, external keyboard, Bluetooth Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad.
  • The other MBP (formerly the 15″ 2006 MBP, now the 15″ 2009 MBP) sits to the left of the Synergy server. It is, of course, a Synergy client.
  • The Dell laptop running Ubuntu Linux sits to the right of the Synergy server and is a Synergy client.

With that in mind, here is a sanitized version of the synergy.conf file I use on the Synergy server (currently the 13″ 2011 MacBook Pro):

section: screens
    center-laptop:
    left-laptop:
    right-laptop:
end

section: aliases
    center-laptop:
        center-laptop.domain.com
        center-laptop-wlan
        center-laptop-wlan.domain.com
    right-laptop:
        right-laptop.domain.com
        right-laptop-wlan
        right-laptop-wlan.domain.com
    left-laptop:
        left-laptop.domain.com
        left-laptop-wlan
        left-laptop-wlan.domain.com
end

section: links
    center-laptop:
        left = left-laptop
        right = right-laptop
    right-laptop:
        left = center-laptop
    left-laptop:
        right = center-laptop
end

section: options
    screenSaverSync = false
    switchCorners = bottom-right
    switchCornerSize = 20
    switchDoubleTap = 150
    keystroke(control+left) = switchInDirection(left)
    keystroke(control+right) = switchInDirection(right)
end

The documentation for Synergy is pretty straightforward, so I’d recommend you read the docs for more details on each of the directives and configuration options above and their function. What this configuration gives me:

  • I can use Control+Left Arrow to move one screen to the left, and Control+Right Arrow to move one screen to the right.
  • The switchDoubleTap option allows me to have to “double-tap” the edge of the screen before it will switch to the next screen; this prevents me from accidentally switching screens when I didn’t mean to.
  • The Mac versions of Synergy didn’t support synchronizing the screen saver, hence the screenSaverSync = false statement.
  • Although it’s not explicitly called out anywhere here, installing the stable 1.3.6 build of Synergy on my Ubuntu laptop was straightforward, and launching Synergy is as simple as /path/to/synergyc center-laptop.

On the Macs, launching Synergy (as either server or client) is handled via shell script called by ControlPlane, a handy Mac application that is a fork of the older (and apparently abandoned) Marco Polo project. The shell script is quite simple; it checks to see if Synergy is running and launches it if it isn’t. (Nothing special there.) On the Linux laptop, I launch it manually as needed.

If you use multiple computers in your office, I’d strongly recommend having a look at Synergy—I’ve found it to be quite useful. If anyone has any other tips or tricks pertaining to Synergy or any of the other topics mentioned in this post, please feel free to speak up in the comments.

Tags: , ,

Setting up a CCNA Study Environment with GNS3 and VMware

Thursday, April 22, 2010 in Linux, Networking, Virtualization by slowe | 16 comments

If you were following my tweets over the last few days, you probably already know that I have been working on setting up a CCNA study environment using Ubuntu Linux, GNS3, and VMware Workstation. After a couple days of difficulties, I finally managed to make it work last night. Here are the steps that I took to make it work.

Before we start, there is the standard disclaimer: these are the steps that worked for me; these steps might or might not work for you, and are almost guaranteed not to work with different Linux distributions or different versions of the associated software.

Here are the software components and versions that I am using in my environment:

  • Ubuntu Linux 8.04.4 LTS, 32 bit
  • GNS3 0.6.1
  • Dynamips 0.2.8-RC2
  • Dynagen 0.10.1.090807
  • VMware Workstation 7.0.1 for Linux, 32 bit

I won’t go into great detail on setting up Ubuntu Linux as there are plenty of resources available for that portion of this environment. You will need to be at least vaguely familiar with the Linux command-line interface (CLI) and basic Linux commands, or you’ll find this process a bit difficult.

Once you have Ubuntu Linux installed and configured appropriately, the first step is to go ahead and install some dependencies using apt-get:

sudo apt-get install dynagen python-qt4

This should download and install both Dynagen and the Python-QT4 libraries. Next, you’ll need to download and install GNS3 0.6.1. There are newer versions of GNS3 available, but earlier attempts to get this environment running with the newer version of GNS3 resulted in problems. Again, your results might differ. Version 0.6.1 of GNS3 is available from the GNS3 SourceForge site.

Once you have GNS3 downloaded, extract it into the directory of your choice (I chose to use /opt/GNS3).

After you’ve downloaded and extracted GNS3, create the following directories under the directory where GNS3 is found:

<GNS3 directory>/project
<GNS3 directory>/ios
<GNS3 directory>/cache
<GNS3 directory>/tmp
<GNS3 directory>/dynamips

Use the chmod and chown commands as necessary to ensure that your user account has full read/write permissions all of these directories except the dynamips directory.

Download a copy of Dynamips (it’s generally available here), put it into the dynamips directory you created, and use the chmod command to make it executable. I also found it necessary to set the Dynamips binary’s SUID bit so that it would always run as root; I know this is not best practice but I could not find any other workaround. (Without setting it SUID, GNS3 would always report an error when trying to launch Dynamips.)

Now launch GNS3 and use the Preferences in the application to set the correct path to your project directory (<GNS3 directory>/project) and the IOS/PIX directory (<GNS3 directory>/ios), the correct path to the Dynamips binary (<GNS3 directory>/dynamips), the correct path to the working directory (<GNS3 directory>/tmp), and the working directory for capture files (set it to your project directory).

At this point you should have a working GNS3 installation. You’ll still need to locate IOS images to use; once you have valid IOS images, place them in the ios directory you created earlier and configure them within GNS3 as needed. You should then be able to create a router instance, boot it, and access the router console from within GNS3.

You could stop there and have a pretty cool environment, but I wanted to go a step further. I also installed VMware Workstation 7.0.1 (I won’t go into detail here, it’s a pretty simple process) and then used the Virtual Network Editor to create some additional host-only networks (in addition to the default vmnet1). Again, this is well-documented already, so I won’t discuss the process in any length. Where it gets interesting is in how you connect GNS3 and these host-only networks so that VMs can be incorporated into your GNS3 router topology.

Here’s how you connect GNS3 and the VMware Workstation host-only networks:

  1. In GNS3, add a cloud object to the topology.
  2. Right-click the cloud object and select Configure.
  3. On the NIO Ethernet tab in the Generic Ethernet NIO section, select one of the host-only networks (like vmnet1) and click Add. This creates a link between the cloud object and the selected host-only network.

At this point, you can attach a VM to the selected host-only network, attach a router to the cloud, and be able to pass traffic from the VM to the router. Pretty cool, huh?

What I’ve done so far is create a simple network with two VMs attached to two different host-only networks which are in turn connected to two different cloud objects and two different routers. Then I created a “serial WAN link” between the two routers (GNS3 won’t, as far as I can tell, actually simulate WAN links with bandwidth limits and latency) and configured everything so that I could pass traffic from one VM to the second VM across the “virtual WAN”. The plan is to increase the network complexity—as much as my poor little Dell laptop will allow given its limited CPU and RAM—and work through the various CCNA study guides in preparation for my exam.

One other quick note about this setup (and the reason why I chose Linux as my host platform): by setting up SSH on the Linux system (with a simple sudo apt-get install openssh-server), I can now SSH into the Linux host system and then use Telnet from there to access all the various routers. In addition, because I’m using OpenBSD as the guest OS on my VMs, I can also SSH from the Linux host to the OpenBSD VMs (assuming my GNS3 network is configured correctly). I’m also thinking that there’s a way I can leverage some VNC connectivity through Workstation to access the VMs as well, but I’ll need to research that a bit to see how it works.

I would be remiss if I did not point out a couple of sites that were extremely helpful in getting this setup up and running. First, this site provided an excellent overview of the GNS3 installation on Ubuntu. Although the walk-through was for a newer version of Ubuntu, the instructions worked perfectly on 8.04.4 LTS. Second, this site gave me the “missing link” on how to connect GNS3 and VMware Workstation’s host-only networks so that you could mix the two environments. Thank you to both sites for outstanding information!

If you are a GNS3 expert or have some additional tips or tricks to share, please add them in the comments below so that all readers can benefit. Courteous comments are always welcome.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Resetting the Root Password on VMware ESX 4.0

Wednesday, January 13, 2010 in Linux, Virtualization by slowe | 11 comments

Earlier today, I had to reset the root password on a lab server running VMware ESX 4.0 Update 1. For some reason, the password we assigned yesterday when we built the server from scratch wasn’t working this morning. OK, no big deal, right? Just reboot the server into single user mode and away you go. I won’t bother to repeat the steps for getting into single user mode; go to this article and it will give you what you need (the article is written for ESX 3.5 but it works fine for ESX 4.0).

Because this is a lab environment we just wanted to assign a simple password that anyone on the team could easily remember. (I’m sure the security purists out there are screaming right now.) Unfortunately, once I had the ESX host booted into single user mode, the passwd command insisted on making me use a complex password. There didn’t seem to be any simple way around the restriction.

However, having spent a fair amount of time with PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) during my Linux-AD integration experiments, I figured there was a way around it by modifying the PAM configuration. Sure enough, the /etc/pam.d/system-auth-generic file contained a reference to pam_passwdqc.so, the library that is responsible for ensuring complex passwords. The fix, therefore, was to somehow remove pam_passwdqc.so from the PAM configuration so that I could assign a simple password.

The first thing I tried was simply commenting out the line for the module, but the passwd command then failed to work, reporting an error that the authentication token could not be obtained. Strike 1! Next, I leave the pam_passwdqc.so module commented out and try changing the next line to required instead of sufficient. Same error: strike 2!

Finally, I simply replaced the pam_passwdqc.so line with a reference to pam_cracklib.so (after making a backup copy of the original /etc/pam.d/system-auth-generic file, of course—it never hurts to be prepared). Success! I was able to assign a simple password to the lab server.

After putting the original /etc/pam.d/system-auth-generic back in place and rebooting the host, we were back in action! So, what was the lesson learned? You can’t stop someone who’s determined to get around security requirements! No, I’m just kidding…there is no lesson learned. I just thought someone might find this information useful or interesting. Enjoy!

Tags: , , , ,

Client-Specific DHCP Options with Linux DHCP Server

Tuesday, July 21, 2009 in Linux, Networking by slowe | 2 comments

Last week, I had a need to present a different set of DHCP options to one specific DHCP client (my iPhone) on my home network. Being the geek that I am, I have a small server set up here at the house running Ubuntu Linux. (You can read about the latest evolution of my home network in this article.) Now, I knew that this was possible using the Windows DHCP server, but I’d never done it with the Linux DHCP server. So, in case you find yourself in a similar situation, here’s how it works.

The Linux DHCP server configuration file (typically dhcpd.conf) is broken into different blocks. For example, the “main” portion of the configuration file might look something like this:

subnet 192.168.128.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
   option routers 192.168.128.1;
   range dynamic-bootp 192.168.128.50 192.168.128.150;:
   option domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220; }

If you want to set up a reservation—so that a particular DHCP client always gets the same IP address—you set up additional blocks, like this:

host <hostname> {
   hardware ethernet 00:11:22:33:44:55;
   fixed-address 192.168.128.200; }

As it turns out, if you want to specify a different set of DHCP options to a client with a reservation (for example, in my situation I wanted to specify a different set of DNS servers), you just add a declaration to the client-specific section:

host <hostname> {
   hardware ethernet 00:11:22:33:44:55;
   fixed-address 192.168.128.200;
   option domain-name-servers 192.168.128.10; }

Of course, now that I know this it seems incredibly obvious. At the time that I was trying to figure this out, though, I wasn’t sure exactly what the syntax would look like. So, next time you find yourself needing to change the options on a DHCP reservation on Linux, you’ll know what to do!

Tags: ,

Strange Error with Firefly Media Server, iTunes, and Avahi

Saturday, May 23, 2009 in Linux, Macintosh, Networking by slowe | 1 comment

Over the 2008-2009 holiday season, I rebuilt my home network. I included the notes and information from my home network rebuild in an article that described the Mac OS X-Ubuntu integration resulting from the rebuild. Since that time, I’ve added a larger hard drive to the home server to make more room for Time Machine backups, movies, music, and other files. Things seemed to be working very well. Until the other day…

My wife made an offhand comment that she couldn’t access the shared music library from her laptop. I tested the connection and, sure enough, every time I clicked the shared library icon it simply disappeared. No error, no warning, no entries in any log files…it just disappeared. I searched the Windows event logs, and I searched the log files on the Ubuntu server downstairs. Neither computer had any entries whatsoever that provided any insight as to why this one computer would not connect to the shared music library.

Being the geeky troubleshooter that I am, I attempted to replicate the problem on some of the other computers on the network. My MacBook Pro worked fine. Three other Windows laptops on the network, running the same version of Windows (Windows XP Professional) and the same Service Pack revision, also worked fine. The problem seemed to be isolated to her computer. Perhaps it was only when she was on the wireless network…nope, the same problem regardless of the network connection.

I upgraded iTunes to the latest version. That didn’t work. I disabled the Windows Firewall on her computer. That didn’t work. I made sure that no traffic was being blocked by the firewall on the Ubuntu server; no traffic was being blocked. In other words, that didn’t work. I was about to give up and just write it off as one of those strange aberrations that couldn’t be resolved and chalk it up to Windows.

Then I stumbled onto this site. I’d already created a daapd.service file for Avahi to use previously, but this site described some additional entries in the daapd.service file that I didn’t have. I made some edits, based on the information on the site, and here’s the daapd.service file I had for Avahi:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">
<service-group>
<name replace-wildcards="yes">Home Media Server</name>
<service>
<type>_daap._tcp</type>
<port>3689</port>
<txt-record>txtvers=1</txt-record>
<txt-record>iTSh Version=131073</txt-record>
<txt-record>Version=196610</txt-record>
</service>
</service-group>

After changing the daapd.service file to the version listed above, I restarted Avahi. Upon the shared media server re-appearing in iTunes, I clicked on it and…drum roll please…it worked! The previous version I had been using did not have the txt-record entries, and I really have no idea why adding the txt-record entries suddenly made my wife’s iTunes connect properly. I suppose it doesn’t matter why it works, it just matters that I FIXED IT! (ePlus engineers who attended our NSM this year will get this joke.)

Still, in the event you’re running into the same issue—a Windows installation of iTunes that fails to connect to a shared music library running on Firefly Media Server—then perhaps updating your Avahi configuration will correct the problem.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Linux-AD Integration Issue: Persistent Connections

Thursday, April 2, 2009 in Interoperability, Linux, Microsoft by slowe | 7 comments

A reader contacted me a short while ago to inquire about a problem he was having with his Linux-AD integration efforts. It seems he had recently added a new domain controller (DC) that was intended to be a DC for a disaster recovery (DR) site. When he took this new DR DC offline in order to physically move it to the DR site, some of his AD-integrated Linux systems started failing to authenticate. More specifically, Kerberos continued to work, but LDAP lookups failed. When the reader would bring the DR DC back online, those systems started working again.

There was a clear correlation between the DR DC and the AD-integrated Linux systems, even though the /etc/ldap.conf file specifically pointed to another DC by IP address. There was no reference whatsoever, by IP address or host name, to the DR DC. Yet, every time the DR DC was taken offline, the behavior returned on a subset of Linux hosts. The only difference we could find between the affected and unaffected hosts was that the affected hosts were not on the same VLAN as the production domain controllers.

I theorized that Windows’ netmask ordering feature, which prioritizes the return of DNS lookups to provide clients with addresses that are “closer” to them, was playing a role here. However, the /etc/ldap.conf was using IP addresses, not the domain name or even the fully qualified domain name of a DC. It couldn’t be DNS, at least not as far as I could tell.

Upon further investigation, the reader discovered that the affected Linux servers—those that were on a different VLAN than both the production DCs as well as the DR DC—were maintaining persistent connections to the DR DC. (He found this via netstat.) When the DR DC went offline, the affected Linux hosts tried to continue to communicate to that DC and that DC only. Once the reader was able to get the affected Linux hosts to drop that persistent connection, he was able to take the DR DC offline and the Linux hosts worked as expected.

So, the real question now becomes: how (or why) did the Linux servers connect to the DR DC instead of the production DC for which they were configured? I think that Active Directory issued an LDAP referral to direct the affected Linux servers to the DR DC as a result of site topology. Perhaps due to an incorrect or incomplete site topology configuration, Active Directory believed the DR DC should handle the VLANs where the affected Linux servers resided. If that is indeed the case, the fix would be to make sure that your AD site topology is correct and that subnets are appropriately associated with sites. Of course, this is just a theory.

Has anyone else seen an issue similar to this? What fix were you able to implement in order to correct it?

Tags: , , , , , ,

Linux VDI and Mobile VM Admin

Monday, March 16, 2009 in Linux, Virtualization by slowe | 2 comments

In all the noise surrounding Cisco UCS, a couple of other smaller news releases were drowned out.

Leostream has partnered with NoMachine that will see Leostream integrating NoMachine’s NX protocol into their connection broker in order to support Linux-based virtual hosted desktops. You can read the full news release is here or here. This will allow Leostream to try to gain ground on VMware View by supporting not only Windows-based hosted virtual desktops, but also virtual desktops running Linux. I think this is a good move by Leostream to further differentiate themselves from market leader VMware, but whether it will be enough to make a difference is another story.

Also today, Rove released version 4.2 of their Mobile Admin product, a product designed to allow administators to manage their infrastructure from the ever-present mobile device. The press release is available here. Rove offered to provide a trial for me to use, but as they don’t yet offer a native iPhone version of Mobile Admin, I had to decline. (Rove is quick to point out that you can use Mobile Safari on the iPhone to access the web version of their application, however. Personally, I prefer native applications.) Mobile Admin is available for the BlackBerry and for Windows Mobile. If you’re in need of some sort of mobile administration solution, this might fit the bill. I’d love to hear from some readers who have used this product—is it good?

Tags: , , , ,

BlueStripe Extends FactFinder to Red Hat Linux

Tuesday, March 10, 2009 in Linux, Virtualization by slowe | No comments

BlueStripe Software, a company I’ve written about a couple of times and who is based in the Raleigh-Durham, NC, area, is launching FactFinder 2.0. I discussed the previous version, FactFinder 1.1, here; and have talked with the guys from BlueStripe on a number of occasions, including at VMworld 2008. I try not to just post press releases or other news information without also adding a little bit of extra information, analysis, or my own thoughts. I have seen FactFinder in action, and it does represent a different way of approaching performance and availability issues. It’s not necessarily a unique way, though, as there are other companies that also work from the application level. I’m confident they don’t use the same technology, but they are working from the application level.

One of the major new features in this new release of FactFinder is support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which allows FactFinder to bring the same application discovery and service-level awareness now to the Linux platform. Of course, FactFinder fully supports both physical and virtualized instances of both Windows and now Linux, and in fact describes their product as a great way to ensure successful P2V (physical-to-virtual) conversions—not just from a “Did the conversion work?” perspective, but more importantly from the perspective of, “Does the application still perform at the required levels?” It’s the applications people care about, after all.

The full press release is here.

Tags: , ,

My Ubuntu-Mac Article is Popular, I Guess

Thursday, January 8, 2009 in Linux, Macintosh by slowe | No comments

Apparently my Ubuntu-Mac integration article is quite popular; it’s been picked up for re-publication on a couple of different sites:

http://linux.sys-con.com/node/803618
http://opensource.sys-con.com/node/803618

Cool! I hope the article is useful to others.

As a quick follow-up to that article, you may recall that I ran into a strange issue with OpenVPN and mt-daapd prior to the home network rebuild. I just finished installing OpenVPN last night and, anticipating the problem, did some digging to see how I’d fix the problem this time around. Turns out there’s nothing to worry about; Avahi skips point-to-point interfaces by default, and OpenVPN tags its interfaces as point-to-point. So, everything works as expected.

Tags: , , , ,

« Older entries