Novell

My institution recently completed a project to replace Novell with Samba. So we just don't renew our Novell contract right? Wrong. I now have to speak with someone in Novell about conducting an Exit Audit. I wonder what that will entail and what we really have to do for them.

Update:They said they wouldn't be auditing us.

freebsd and dim of the yard!

I installed FreeBSD today with dim: A pure-Python window manager for the X window system. I like the minimalism of them both as well as being able to tag groups of windows. Below are my notes.

1. Did a default FreeBSD install
2. Updated to the latest ports
3. Install only the packages you need:
   

   pkg_add -r xorg xorg-fonts urwfonts freetype py27-xpyb 
              libXfontcache xdm portupgrade git bash emacs 
              chromium 
   

4. Configure X
5. Clone dim from github
6. Configure a .xession:
   

   xset m 12/4/8
   xrdb -merge $HOME/.Xdefaults
   xsetroot -solid steelblue
   xterm &
   exec /usr/local/src/dim/bin/dim
   

Make sure you have the latest FreeBSD port of xpyb. The port tree upgrade above should cover you but if you do not have at least 1.3.1 try:

portsnap fetch
portsnap extract
portsnap update
pkg_install -r portupgrade
portupgrade -R py27-xpyb 

nginx to load balance

A co-worker showed me an article on how to Use Nginx for Proxy Services and Software Load Balancing.

RHEV & UCS

My organization is using RHEV which is a RedHat supported version of the Apache Licensed oVirt. Video.linux.com has videos teaching the use of the system including an introduction to oVirt architecture. RedHat also has ePub versions of 12 documents including their REST API documentation, which looks very promising for CLI and automation tasks. It has a nice GUI if you can stand IE; Firefox support is coming and the IE requirement is just a remnant of the company they bought to get RHEV, from whom they then released the source. A windows server is no longer required (just Tomcat and PostgreSQL). If you really can't stand a Windows VM you can go all CLI; just accept that behind the scenes it will be passing XML to the server and back.

We're still using Dell servers but are considering Cisco UCS. UCS attracted me because it offers flexibilities that standard servers don't seem to have, in particular the ability the manage physical machines like virtual machines. For example, automatically flash any subset of the servers with a variety of properties including: version x of the firmware, the mac address of the previous server running it so the OS can't tell the difference after a hardware upgrade, and to store and apply machines profiles like software. Also, we already have full Cisco network gear and the cabling for it is much simpler with just two 40G uplinks for a full chassis. Like the XIV and RHEV, it has a platform independent GUI as well as a CLI which is all based on the same XML API. With all of Cisco's talk of vmWare you might think they didn't know RHEV existed but RHEV is fully supported and tested by Cisco. UCS also has plugins for RHEV to integrate management. I can imagine using the similar API in a single script to orchestrate events on my SAN, Server, and Cluster manager and it seems attractive.

Below are some slides from a joint presentation from RedHat and Cisco on RHEV and UCS:

Galaxy Nexus GSM works with iPhone 3G Mini SIM Card

Two years ago I switched from an iPhone to a Nexus One. When I made the change I simply put my iPhone 3G Mini SIM card in the Nexus One and everything worked and I had 3G speeds. I have recently upgraded to the unlocked GSM version of the Galaxy Nexus and again I did the same SIM card swap. Again everything worked and I seem to have HSPA speeds. Three back to back tests with speedtest.net on the Nexus One had a download speed of about 0.75 Mbps while the download speed on the Galaxy Nexus was about 1.25Mbps. I know there are people out there getting much faster download speeds with the Galaxy Nexus on GSM but I attribute that to my area.