Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Looking up .local DNS names under OSX

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

My workplace uses a .local DNS suffix for all internal DNS, which of course causes problems when you're running a system which uses any form of mdns - such as OSX or Ubuntu (or probably any modern Linux distro, I know SuSE had this problem about 6 years ago). The ...

OSS Network Imaging / Install services

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

I'm very interested in the topic of network deployments of operating systems, specifically the various Microsoft OSs, as I can already install linux via PXEboot. There's two main groups of software in this field - unattended or scripted installs, and imaged installs. A while ago I found a tool called Unattended, ...

Xenserver Enterprise + Fibrechannel storage = live migration

Wednesday, November 28th, 2007

I finally got round to booking time at the IBM demo center to have a fiddle with Xen Enterprise on shared storage. They've got a good range of entry-level kit at the demo center, but the important bits (for me anyway) were a Bladecenter H chassis with some HS21 blades ...

Benchmarks of an Intel SRSC16 RAID controller

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

One of our clients gave us an Intel server with an Intel SRSC16 SATA RAID controller and a 500 GB +hotspare RAID1 set up on it, to install XenServer Express 4.0.1 system. While building the system up for him, I noticed abysmal write perfomance. It was taking around ...

Touchgraph Google Browser

Tuesday, September 4th, 2007

Saw the TouchGraph Google Browser mentioned on an irc channel today. Touchgraph make graph based visualisation, showing spatial relationships and correlations between data. The google browser uses results from a google search as the input; Touchgraph have Facebook and Amazon visualisations as well, but I guess their main business is ...

Debian Etch and apt-proxy issues

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007

Debian Etch (4.0) was released on Monday, and I have to say I wasn't at all prepared. I've got about 70 machines that will probably need to be upgraded to Etch at some point in the near future. I could leave some of them running sarge, but I'll definitely have ...

Puppet - a system configuration tool

Wednesday, March 7th, 2007

I saw a couple of blog posts about puppet recently. I've been meaning to investigate cfengine for a while now, and puppet was a new angle on the same problem. From the intro: Puppet is a system configuration tool. It has a library for managing the system, a language for ...

Backspace in Firefox 2

Wednesday, October 25th, 2006

As part of my upgrade to Edgy the other day, Firefox was upgraded to 2.0. It's been upgraded every day since then, and is I think finally running a real 2.0 build [code] $ apt-cache show firefox | grep Version Version: 2.0+0dfsg-0ubuntu3 [/code] The biggest interface changes I've noticed to Firefox 2 so far include ...

Edgy Eft RC1 announced

Friday, October 20th, 2006

After seeing this announcement for the Edgy Eft RC1 release, I decided to upgrade my Dapper laptop to Edgy. Thanks to the NZ mirror already being up to date, it didn't take long to download the 700MB of packages that I needed. I'd like to say the upgrade went smoothly, ...

Xensource Xen Enterprise

Tuesday, September 26th, 2006

I've been following the Xensource Xen Enterprise product for a couple of months at work. The current release ships with an install CD which preps a barebones server. It installs linux with a Xen kernel and the Xen toolset, but doesn't ask you many questions - the dom0 is really ...