Links of the Day: June 18, 2008

Eight Black – Going. Going. Nearly Gone. “To put this into some sort of basic perspective, if you had purchased $1000 worth of BlueFreeway stock exactly 1 year ago, that would be worth the princely sum of $42 as of close of play today.”

Virtual Geek – So, how **EXACTLY** does VM HA’s admittance algorithm work? “What’s the symptom – you can’t create new VMs without violating the availability constraints – even when you think you have plenty left, or you upgraded from Virtual Center 2.0.x to 2.5 and can’t shake the “Insufficient Resources to Satisfy” HA error.”

xAnalisys – VMware Infrastructure 3 in a Cisco Network Environment “VMware has collaborated with Cisco to produce a guide for deploying VMware Infrastucture 3 with Cisco switches. This guide covers the physical and virtual data network and storage network deployment … with suggested topologies and designs.”

Pawprints of the Mind – Getting Xen up and running: part II “This post is intended for people who are trying to set up a private network with Xen virtual machines.” Virtual networks are unsupported in base Xen but this is a Debian centric how-to which worked first time.

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Links of the Day: June 17, 2008

smh.com.au – Cut fuel price, say voters Why do people think the government should intervene in the supply/demand determined pricing of a scarce resource? Did everyone fail economics 101?

Acer Aspire One notebook review “if Acer wants it to be seen as anything other than a mini-notebook it needs to quickly launch its connected version as this edition is only a success on the price point, lacking the usability and build quality we’ve come to expect from this market.”

TrustedReviews – Asus Eee PC 901 20G Linux Edition “Brimming with features and with a new CPU and better battery, the Eee PC 901 personifies exactly the spirit in which the original was created. …bit more expensive … lack a more comfortable keyboard, but … the 901 has once again set the standard.”

TrustedReviews – First Look: MSI Wind “…though the Wind lacks the classiness of the Mini-Note… it’s a good looking machine that shares a visual style with the Eee PC – albeit in a slightly larger chassis. …it looks as though MSI has put together a very commendable effort…”

VM /ETC – Can you Vmotion between different physical data centers? “Chad goes on to point out that he feels stretching ESX Clusters is a bad idea in general and lists 4 solid reasons to support why. Check out all the whole post at the link above.”

Building a Low Cost (Cheap) VMWare ESX Test Server. “My job now involves more and more virtualised (or virtualized if you’re one of our American cousins from across the pond) server implementations so this is a good excuse to go and build my own VMWare ESX test environment.”

Virtual Geek: Building a Home VMware Infrastructure Lab “This is something I consider mandatory if you’re going to take VMware as seriously as I think everyone should :-)”

Connect VMware ESX Server to a free iSCSI SAN using Openfiler “In this article, we take a look at how you can download a free open-source iSCSI server and use it as your SAN storage for VMware ESX and its advanced features.”

Openfiler (The link in the previous article is out of date) “Openfiler converts an industry standard x86/64 architecture system into a full-fledged NAS/SAN appliance or IP storage gateway and provides storage administrators with a powerful tool to cope with burgeoning storage needs.”

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Virtualisation Buzzwords

So I was thinking a bit more about virtualisation buzzwords after my discovery the other day.

“Virtualisation 1.0” appears to be the concept of virtualising physical hosts onto a defined set of infrastructure. Whether the VM farm is in-house or outsourced is largely irrelevent. What is important for buzzword compliance is that there is still a farm with limits, location etc.etc.

“Virtualisation 2.0” appears to be the concept of virtualising physical hosts onto “clouds”. The VM farm is provided by infrastructure-as-a-service and it’s implied that limits, location etc.etc. are non-issues because they are “someone else’s problem”.

The problem is that the possibilities in this space are not easily pigeon-holed into only two categories. It just does a disservice to whatever you are trying to describe to fall back on these kinds of buzzwords.

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Firefox 3 Download Day

Download Day

“Set a Guinness World Record, Enjoy a Better Web. Sounds like a good deal, right? All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours – it’s that easy.”

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Links of the Day: June 15, 2008

Virtualization 2.0 So I only came across this buzzword for the first time today. A quick Google search and it became clear that it’s been thrown about for almost two years. Why not call a spade a spade and bang on about “infrastructure virtualisation” instead?

Rolling Stone – The Battle For Facebook Short on technical detail, long on melodrama.

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Links of the Day: June 14, 2008

smh.com.au – ACCC thwarts eBay PayPal plan. A win for common sense! “The [ACCC] has flagged its intention to scuttle a plan by online auctioneer eBay to force its Australian users on to a PayPal-only payments system. Citing concerns about the ‘anti-competitive effect’ of the proposal…”

Coding Horror: ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers Be sure to read the comments too… “What the heck is an octothorpe? I know this as the pound key, but that turns out to be a US-centric word; most other cultures know it as the hash key.”

PostCarbon Information and Communication Technology (ICT) “… ICT is … completely dependent on fossil fuels. IF this … is not changed … there will be no PostCarbon ICT, period.” Original has horrible formatting.

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Links of the Day: June 13, 2008

37signals – Git smart: How we’re using Git to track our source code. I’ve been using bzr a lot lately but every man and his dog and their source code seems to be switching to git. Must take a deeper look one of these days.

Changing the IP-address of an ESX host and HA – Yellow Bricks. “…changed the ip-address of three VMware ESX hosts. …standard VMware procedure, which usually works… In this case after the ip-address was changed HA did not work…” See also http://www.booches.nl/index.php/2008/06/05/change-esx-host-ip-address/

NAT caveats in IOS release 12.4T – CT3 “The Network Address Translation (NAT) in IOS release 12.4T works significantly differently from the previous implementations (including mainstream IOS release 12.4).”

Cloud Computing vs Grid Computing “…the term ‘Cloud Computing’ is relatively new to the Technology buzz. But just how new is it? …analysing search trends of different computing keywords to try to put everything in perspective.”

Audi TP52 crash gybes to avoid broaching Cristabella – 1 of 3 Crazy!

Audi TP52 crash gybes to avoid broaching Cristabella – 2 of 3

Audi TP52 crash gybes to avoid broaching Cristabella – 3 of 3

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Daily Links Automated

As can be seen from the previous post I’m back!

The best bit is that post was created automatically. I use del.icio.us to bookmark interesting things I read day to day. It has support for daily links posted to your blog but that requires XML-RPC support which Blosxom doesn’t have out of the box.

So I wrote a small perl script which downloads links daily and creates a post if there are any for that day. Most of the heavy lifting is done by Net::Delicious (which I turned into a deb package for Ubuntu Hardy) and to save time a lot of inspiration was drawn from Edward de Leau’s WordPress script.

Final problem. I want it to run at midnight UTC (del.icio.us’ “get by date” API works in UTC) in order to grab all the links for an entire day when they are fresh, fresh, fresh. But how do you run this out of CRON on a system that is in timezone “Australia/Sydney” with all it’s daylight savings fun, fun, fun?

# Only want this to run just before midnight GMT
59 9 * * * /bin/date +\%z | /bin/grep -q 1000 && /path/to/delicious2blosxom.pl
59 10 * * * /bin/date +\%z | /bin/grep -q 1100 && /path/to/delicious2blosxom.pl

Run it twice a day but check for the current UTC offset first. The first covers normal Sydney time, the second daylight savings. Sweet!

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Links of the Day: June 12, 2008

del.icio.us/help/api/posts Blosxom doesn’t have XML-RPC support by default so I’ll need to script an API call to download daily bookmarks.

Aaron Straup Cope / Net-Delicious – search.cpan.org Someone may have already done the heavy lifting for me!

Publishing Links With Perl, by Jeffrey Veen Just in case I get lazy and need a cheat sheet…

http://edward.de.leau.net/code/wpds.txt Actually this one turned out more useful.

net::delicious bug #30310: Error messages when used with warnings on I was getting an error (“Use of uninitialized value in -f at /usr/share/perl5/Net/Delicious.pm line 228.”) from my script, seems there is already a bug filed for it.

Royal Pingdom : Javascript framework usage among top websites Caught my attention because the name MooTools sounds like something JohnF would nave named.

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Some helpful addons for Apache and PHP…

Jdub points out a couple of packages which I’m off to install right now.

I’ve always redirected to a “one true” FQDN on my websites by using an extra virtualhost container and a redirect rule. libapache2-redirtoservname to the rescue!

I don’t use as much PHP as a I used to but I’m sure that what little is on there will find php5-xcache gives it a boost.

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