Monthly Archives: September 2007

Server machine OS upgrade (cont’d 2)

How to break up all the different environments in VM land?

I think I will try to further continue the division of services as specialized VMs.

Main OS, will take care of file sharing. Experiment with installing SuSE with ALL the options unchecked. And then build up from there with services.

– First VM would be a internet server environment. Maybe a LAMP server?
– Second would be a VM to manage TV shows recordings. Initially it will probably be BeyondTV based, but eventually go to MythTV.
– Third would be an application server? (With no desktop PC except for the laptop, more power intensive applications would be ran remontly)

Where do I put SlimServer?

Server machine OS upgrade (cont’d)

More thoughts on this:
– Have been experimenting with XEN, and it turns out that the server CPU (Athlon64 3700+) doesn’t have hardware virtualization built in. However, the desktop (Athlon64 X2 4000+) does.
No Hardware virtualization means that a special kernel is required for the OS to run, which excludes Windows as being one of the OSs. Not that it’s a problem, but it would have made the initial switch, easier, since the BeyondTV software could be ran and setup easily.
– The reason XEN is attractive is because it allows for PCI devices to be dedicated to certain XEN environments, which means even under virtualization, I can use pci devices in the VM environments.

I think the simple solution is to buy Socket939 CPU with virtualization, and call it a day.
UPDATE: Or just use the Athlon64 X2 4000+ machine. I can always upgrade the socket 939 box later and probably for cheaper. Besides, the Asus M2N-E mobo with the x2 CPU has more PCI slots (3 in total)

I’ve tried to make things work on a budget, but for $60 I can get a dual core cpu that will do the trick. Much easier to spend the small amount then to spend endless hours trying to get software modified…

I think the decision is clear.

Server machine OS upgrade (to SuSE 10.3)

As part of the consolidation project, I need to be able to virtualize the current TV recording PC.
This means being able to capture video in a virtual machine, and the only way that seems to have any potential success is using a USB capture device.
So I bought one. PVR HPV 950 (or something like that?)
I spent most of last night trying to get USB devices to be seen by either Virtual Box or VMware Workstation 6, in SuSE 10.2, but to no avail.

However, the laptop running SuSE 10.3RC1 with VMware workstation 6 had no problem detecting a WiFi USB adaptor, with no fussing with the host OS.. I’ll have to try the actual capture card tonight, and see how well it performs.
All it needs to do is capture video. No TV watching.

The only change I made to the Suse 10.3 system was modified the usbfs entry in the /etc/fstab file, to ‘auto’ from ‘noauto’. That’s it. After a reboot, I installed VMware Workstation, and the USB passthrough worked. Continue reading

Booting the desktop problem

To make along story short, the desktop PC won’t boot.

After some digging around, something must have happened to the BIOS? because all the reference points in the grub menu (/boot/grub/menu.lst) were pointing to (hd0,4).
But it turns out that (hd0,4) is not a partition all of a sudden, and it should be (hd0,3). I’m referring to /dev/sda4 partition.
Anyway, to install the grub menu in the mbr, try this in the grub menu console:
grub> root (hd0,3) #this I think tells grub which partition is root
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1 #this I think tells grub where to get the stage1 data.
grub> setup (hd0) #this I think tells grub where to install itself

Home PC consolidation project (2)

Have been thinking about this some more.
The reason I have the X2 4000+ as the desktop is because I sometimes do want to run some CPU intensive apps.

But what if I can run most CPU intensive tasks remotely on a more powerful machine?
NoMachine seems to deliver EXCELLENT remote performance, so running apps remotely may be a viable option.
CPU intensive apps are:
– Catia
– Some video editing/processing

Planning for a new web-based password management system

This is just a brain-storming session to get ideas down:

– Category system. (ie. web hosts, online banking, forums…)
– encrypt all info in database, except ID
– when viewing data, only show password when cursor is passed over the line.

Two tables: One is a table of categories and another table is a password table.
Category table:
ID, category name, category desc

Password table;
ID, host, login, password, comments

For the data encyption in the database, hardcode in the PHP code a passkey that is used to encode and decode the data.

Ok That is a bad idea. The data is sent in plain text between the browser and the server php code, so anyone listening can grab the text easily…
Going to do the encryption/decryption in javascript, on the browser, so all the data sent back to server, and then to browser is encrypted.
This is trickier to do (for my skill level) but will try it out.

On third thought, I will stick with the first option. Much easier to implement. As long as one can establish a SSL connection to the site, encryption is not a problem.
In the interest of getting the project started, I will take the easy way out, and maybe in a later version implement the more secure method of encrypting/decrypting the data in the browser.

This needs a name too… WPM (Web Password Manager)??