Month: August 2007

Categories
linux NSP Xen

Has VMWare seen the writing on the wall?

As seen here, VMWare is set to slash the pricing for VMWare ESX and VirtualCenter for the SME market – three copies of ESX and a limited copy of VirtualCenter, for the nice round price of $3k US – a significant price cut. This is hot on the heels of XenSource’s new pricing and acquisition by Citrix (XenSource also has a current promotion of “buy one, get three” as an introduction to the new XE 4.0 pricing model.)

Has VMWare seen the writing on the wall? They look a bit defensive at times. Or maybe VMWare has just realised they’ve neglected the SME market for too long. In NZ especially, most businesses are in the SME bracket, and just can’t afford VMWare’s prices – it’s cheaper to buy a new server machine in most cases.

Xen Enterprise’s new price tag of $2.5kUS may be outside their reach as well, but most SMEs don’t need the enterprise features present in XenSource’s flagship product. XenServer, at $750 US, fits right in the sweet spot, along with VirtualIron’s flagship offering.

Categories
linux NSP Tool of the Week WLUG

NUT: Network UPS Tools

I was tweaking the UPS rules at a client’s site, when I noticed that the base NUT configuration that we use didn’t really do a hell of a lot. The example config files had some hints as to what were needed, but unless I missed something fundamental, didn’t have the full picture.

After a bit of searching, my laptop battery ran out so I couldn’t carry on working onsite. I did get far enough to make some notes, but I have since lost the site I referred to, so can’t put proper attribution. It looked something like this one though, and was also dedicated to setting up NUT on a Mac, so I figure that will do.

I’ve since returned to this issue, and after fighting with serial and USB cables, have finally completed and tested it all. My configuration is on the WLUG wiki at the NutNotes page.

Categories
Tool of the Week WLUG

“Useful” command line tools

A coworker was doing some work on a server we’re building up, and wanted to kill a bunch of processes. The killall binary wasn’t installed for some reason (default etch install, probably just missing the package), but he found a killall5 binary instead.

For those of you who don’t know, killall5 is the SysV version of killall. It’s quite a bit more literal about it’s functionality than the killall most of us are used to – it will, without taking any command line arguments, prompting if you are sure, or any indication of what is about to happen, send a kill signal to all processes.

I was in the middle of saying “Don’t run that” when my coworker did. Oops. Good thing we were still building the server and it was on the build desk next to him.

This got me thinking though. Are there any other command line tools that are similarly dangerous as killall5? That is, they will do something terminal to your system, without prompting for help or confirmation?