blogs

In the quest for the perfect Linux distro, and to better familarize myself with others... I occationally download and install lots of distributions. Recently I gave Vector Linux and OpenSUSE a try.

It seems that a sort of hypervisor is going to be added to the mainline Linux kernel. It has been dubbed KVM... as if KVM weren't already taken by "Keyboard, Video Mouse". In this case, KVM stands for Kernel-based Virtual Machine... and it only works in CPUs that have VT (Intel) or AMD-V/SVM (AMD) extensions via a module named kvm.ko... and will available upon the release of the 2.6.20 kernel.

How does it differ from other virtualization schemes? From the FAQ:

What is the difference between kvm and Xen?

Xen is an external hypervisor; it assumes control of the machine and divides resources among guests. On the other hand, kvm is part of Linux and uses the regular Linux scheduler and memory management. This means that kvm is much smaller and simpler to use.

On the other hand, Xen supports both full virtualization and a technique called paravirtualization, which allows better performance for modified guests. kvm does not at present support paravirtualization.

What is the difference between kvm and VMWare?

VMware is a proprietary product. kvm is Free Software released under the GPL.

What is the difference between kvm and QEMU?

Qemu uses emulation; kvm uses processor extensions for virtualization.

And now for the question everyone wants to ask:

What OSs can I run inside kvm VM?

We have tested Linux (32/64 bit) and Windows (32 bit). Others may or may not work. 64-bit Windows is known not to work. This will be fixed once qemu-0.8.3 is released and merged. Several Linux flavors are known to hang on Intel processors during startup. Workaround is to disable splashscreens in grub.

I wonder how long before this becomes part of all of the distributions... and how it might conflict with Xen???

Front viewI have an old server at work. It hasn't been used since last Spring. It lasted a fair amount of time (4 years)... yet it is still a fairly capable machine: 1.1GHz Xeon CPU, 2GB of RAM, 1 IDE system disk, a 3ware ATA RAID controller with 8ea 80GB drives (RAID5) and redundant power. I believe it was purchased in late 2001.

One of the RAID drives died and I put in a replacement today. I didn't need to rebuild the existing RAID because I wanted to do a new install anyway... but it makes me wonder if I should even bother. Side viewI mean, the drives that are in it now are at least 4 years old. They are an accident waiting to happen. So, I have a few options... I can retire the machine and scrap it... or I could spend around $800 and buy some new ATA drives. I figure that the hard drives are the most vulnerable piece in the system... other than say... the fans... that I'll replace if they are showing some wear.

Back viewIs it worth the money to turn this machine into a backup server? ...or should I just retire it? Do you think the hardware will last a few more years? It would run Linux of course. It was previously.

Let comments be your answer!

Okay I said I would do some explaining. I don't want this to get long so I'll try to summarize.

My coworker who does GIS work here is using a workstation formerly used by another former employee. This PC has seen its day I think. All the form boxes in applications and websites are out of proportion and sorta smooshed into other text. I took a stab at figuring out what it was to no avail. Okay that was short and sweet. Then recently a couple apps started popping up the Windows installer every time the Desktop was accessed. Thinking he must have some spyware or virus, I scanned his machine and ultimately uninstalling one of the two troubling apps to work with one at a time popping up. As administrator things seem to work fine after going through the install motions but only for that session and IT has these locked down so that users can't do installs. So in one effort to fix that dang form box monitor resolution issue, I install a different video driver and viola! it is fixed. Install one of the pissy apps and wham it's all crap again.

Damn those company computer guys!

Warren is the guy who has been running Gallery for a few years now. Me? I ran it at my previous job but I didn't get into it much.

Cybernet PCNow I'm running Drupal and on the default Apache/PHP install, PHP is limited to 8MB of RAM. That works fine for most everything... but when you get into graphics processing, it isn't even close. Graphics Processing? The image upload (and photo gallery) module for Drupal take an uploaded image file and then generates a preview size (640x480) image and a thumbnail (125x125?) image. It can use ImageMagick or the GD image processing packages.

Forgot to bring lunch today from home and was left without my backup stock of Ramen Noodles. Running low on cash I decided to head to Wendy's or to some of our cohorts "Wenchies". I slapped down the Discover card as a means to get by. This time of the year I seem to always fall into the rut of waiting until the last moments to make those special purchases our loved ones "expect" of us to achieve. But I digress... that isn't what todays post is about.

Today I was reminded of one of Jesus' stories about what it takes to be welcomed into the kingdom of Heaven in Matthew and Luke. As I sat eating my lunch I was reminded of this because I saw this man there who I see there all the time. He wears a watch on both wrists and loves to clap his hands out of joy as he reaches over his head. To many he is a nuisance and move away; to others they ignore and still others watch as if at the zoo. But I thought that this man; like the classroom of children visiting there for lunch today, didn't really care much about what others were thinking of him. To think what we could accomplish if we only were like a child who does not worry about what others think. As adults we tend to hold back answering a question in front of an audience for fear of screwing up. He seems so innocent as he should because he is in the eyes of God.

Yeah I'm gonna burn out doing blogs soon enough. But I have so much to say! Earlier was just a follow up to yesterday so here is what I've been working on since noon.

Well last year around Thanksgiving my email server secure certificates expired and so I dreaded having to re-learn how to do this. I figured renewing would be cake. I really couldn't find much in howto's for doing this. So last year I just created a new one and oddly with an expired CA to the best of my knowledge. At any rate I just did a one year since I figured I would/should have upgraded or moved on by this time now. Trust me I have been trying to but very slowly. So I found a howto for renewing your certs. First off I followed the directions and all was swell. Then trying to get Thunderbird (TB) to take/see the new certs didn't fare as well. Then I found that my CA expired in like August of 2004! Then after creating new ca and certs TB still didn't see the new one. Aha! Forgot about the flip side of SMTP... IMAP. I thought I would cheat and just do a symlink to the existing postfix cert but that didn't go well. Then I found the makeimapcert script and used that to renew one more year.

As usual with most tech support I deal with they tend to have you rehash much of what you already have done; assuming you are technically savvy yourself. It infuriates me further to have to jump though their hoops to get any cooperation. The first reply this morning from IT is to "power down the printer and retry the same documents and report what the error logs say". Well the only thing that proved was that this issue did not produce those error logs. Those errors were probably legit.

So on my own I attempt to print to file and use DOS to copy the file to the device. Here I get "The system cannot write to the specified device." This sounds like a write permissions problem. Just before I even got the email off to report this to them, I got a message back stating they changed the spool settings and reboot our server.

I've been able to print to our Lanier multi function printer all morning. This afternoon, my coworker starts having trouble printing to any printer on the network. He can print Word documents fine but nothing graphical. I tested and can't print graphics either now. I keep getting a balloon pop-up saying it failed consistently until it is removed from the spool.

Well with my history in dealing with IT issues in our corporate world IT team hasn't been pleasant recently. So I decided not to dig too deep and called, left a message with them. I mentioned the error logs on the printer show different errors stating the stapler failed or the hole punch failed. Since this is a problem on at least three Windows boxes and two network printers I suspected the Windows server as the culprit. In my VMWare Player running Linux, I can print directly just fine.