I had a new VM host at $WORK I was trying to set up, and I kept running into problems when installing a VM with koan/cobbler: it would complain that "at most 2047 MB can be simulated" for a VM. This was on a 64-bit machine, with a 64-bit kernel (CentOS 5.8), with 128 GB of memory installed (and detected), with a 64-bit guest being installed.
In the end, I had neglected to install the kvm package from CentOS, which among other things includes the kvm-kmod module. Once I got that installed and rebooted, everything went fine.
I've got a new workstation at $WORK. (Well, where else would it be?) It's pretty sweet: i7 quad-core processor, clock speed > 3GHz (honestly, I barely keep track anymore), and 8GB of RAM. 8GB! Insane.
When I arrived in 2008, I used a -- not cast-off, but unused P4 with 4 GB of RAM. I didn't want to make a big fuss about it; I saved the fuss, instead, for a nice business laptop from Dell that worked well with Linux. Since 90% of my work is Firefox + Emacs + XTerms, and my WM of choice at the moment is Awesome, speed was not a problem and the memory was fine.
Lately, though, I've discovered Vagrant. It looks pretty sweet, but my current machine is sloooow when I try to run a couple of VMs. (So's my laptop, despite a better processor; I suspect the 5400RPM drive.) I'm hoping that the new machine will make a big difference.
Just gotta install Ubuntu and move stuff over. Fortunately I've been pretty good about keeping my machine config in Cfengine, so that'll help. And then build some VMs. I'm always surprised at people who feel comfortable downloading random VM images from the Internet. Yeah, it's probably okay...but how do you know?
One thing that Vagrant is missing is integration with Cfengine. Fortunately, the documentation for extending it seems pretty good (plus, I can always kick things off with a shell script). This might be an excuse to learn Ruby.
Here we go:
And that's all for now.
Ran into a little problem this week when I tried to do a restore from a backup at work. Bacula loaded the tape, then said it couldn't read the label. Wha?
After much investigation, during which I completely neglected to cut-n-paste the error messages, I think I've figured out what happened:
Ack. Needless to say, this was not good. Fortunately, the file in question was not a terribly important one; unfortunately, that's about the last 2 weeks of incrementals gone. Lesson learned: don't assume your backup program knows what's going on when hardware reboots from under it.
In other news: on Thursday I got 5 new Dell servers. Woot! One of 'em will be our new LDAP/web/email/FTP server (Xen ftw!); the rest are going to be running protein search engines for various researchers across BC. They're racked and I'm stoked, except that it turns out the difference between the DRAC6 Express and Enterprise, besides a few hundred dollars, is that the Enterprise does console redirection and the Express doesn't. Dammit.
I'm going to see if there's any trickery that can be done, but I'm not holding out hope. I have got a 32-port console server, but it's two racks away...might have to run a small batch o' cables up and over to make this work.
Last week, when I figured I'd have to move servers, I figured I had three options:
This Ask Slashdot gave me lots of suggestions, and after puttering around for a while I narrowed it down to either JohnCompanies or Linode. They both had lots of good references, both in the article and elsewhere, but in the end the lower cost of Linode got me.
I ordered the 384 plan -- 384MB RAM, 12GB disk space -- and within a couple hours I was set up. Static IP (coming from cable, that's ver' nice), reverse DNS however you like (w00t!), and more transfer than I figure I'll use in a year (seriously).
The Debian install took, like, four minutes, tops. It was maybe an afternoon's work to figure out all the packages I needed (including stopping an accidental upgrade to -testing). Big shout out to rsync and ssh, without whom yadda yadda. All in all, dead dead simple.
The one thing that maybe should've been a bit more prominent in Linode's advertising is their use of the IO limiter patch for UML. I found out about this in passing after I'd signed up but before I'd had a chance to log in. (There are a few details about it here, and you can read the patch here.) In fairness, though, I've run up against the limit in untarring big-ass home directories, but not since.
Anyhow…pretty damned satisfied with Linode so far. Their web management panel is slick, the console access is lovely to have, and I've no complaints about performance yet. I'll probably just stick with them for a few months, as I hope to switch ISPs once I get back from vacation...but I think it'll be very tempting to stay with them.