Archive for the ‘NSP’ Category

Has VMWare seen the writing on the wall?

Thursday, August 30th, 2007

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 ...

NUT: Network UPS Tools

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

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 ...

Feisty Fawn and Software RAID

Thursday, April 12th, 2007

It turns out there's a race condition in Feisty Fawn, which can cause software RAID sets to not be set up on boot. This is problematic if you have your root partition on software RAID Bug #75681 discusses this in some detail, although there are several suggestions on how to fix ...

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 ...

Xensource and VMWare performance comparison

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

I was discussing Xensource with a potential client a few weeks ago, and was fairly surprised when they pulled out a performance comparison of VMWare and Xen, which showed VMware massively outperforming Xen in several tests. On further inspection, it was fairly obvious that VMWare's tests used the open-source version ...

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 ...

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 ...