Concepts in the Paradox

My upstream provider, United Layer, has struck again, this time causing a 24 times spike in my daily traffic use for no logical reason, which of course I get charged for. Something about broadcast packets or some such. Anyway, I pay the big bucks for people to solve these problems for me.

Things may be up and down with the blogs, webhosts, photo server, and email until this very expensive problem is resolved. As the title says, please excuse the mess.

Anyone want a 1 year+ contract doing general Unix stuff in Oakland at my work? You’d be working with Solaris and SAN ideally, but just having half a brain when it comes to Unix would be enough.

Job opening.

The room is reserved, the Wiki is updated and tshirts and hats have been printed for Hacker Jeopardy thanks to BigEdog.

I haven’t even selected what talks I’m going to yet, I suppose I’ll update that tomorrow. Even though some people have flaked, it is still going to be the biggest turn out of my friends doing anything, ever, plus meeting new people I’ve never met before in person. I even printed up business cards for the occasion.

So let’s say you are going to the con, and you want to track me down? Well, look for me in the official llama-tipping shirt, you can’t miss it. These are printed coutesy of Finnie.org, of Finnix fame. He’ll be handing out CDs of his Linux distro — ask him for a signed copy. Beware, I will be representing the pro-zombie platform this year, so if you run Windows, I might just try to eat your brain.

After some phone calls and emails with sales and support, I managed to get my site at work enrolled in the Xen Enterprise closed beta. This means I’ll get support for free during the beta, and I’ll be a leg up come release time. They ask 10 hours a week, my work-allocated time to VT research, plus a 45 minute phone call at the end of the week. My boss was pretty happy about it, and I’m pretty happy about it, because I really think this Xen stuff will take off. Open source + Hypervisor = past and future for computing.

Target:

SLES9 x86-64 on Sun Fire x4200. This is their officially supported version, so this works for me. Later I plan to move to Pacifica when it becomes available from Sun.

Just a heads-up to all my readers, I’m moving this blog over to Wordpress in the coming days, mainly because Wordpress is much better at comment spam than Newbruiser. Also, while I like keeping my entries in plaintext, using a database scales better. The site is getting pretty darn slow these days.

On the computer front, my file server seems to have forgotten about it’s network interface. I don’t know how long ago this happened, but I guess I should fix it. Backups are sort of important, and all my backups get dumped onto this box every night.

The Z is happily compiling Konqueror-embedded and xmms, and has been for a few hours now. The poor thing has some pretty terrible disk I/O, and I’m wondering if it would just be faster to do my compiles over the wireless with NFS. The disk is really slow — like it matters though. When I put it into daily use I’m not going to be compiling things all the time. I’m going to post a Palm TX vs. Z SL-C3200 review here in a few days and post my package builds as well. Openbsd doesn’t include pre-compiled packages for the Z, much to my chagrin.

I’m in the process of finding all the bits and pieces for my Mac Mini so I can put it up on Craigslist. So far I have the Mac Mini (512MB, wifi, bt, super drive, 1.42Ghz), Belkin Hub for Mac Mini, and iSight gathered together. I need to reload the OS, stick it in a box, then see how much I can get someone in the city to give me for it. I’m thinking about $600 for everything, maybe $500. I don’t know what I’m going to do with the extra cash since it counts as computer budget, and there isn’t anything I really want right now. Perhaps I’ll get a Happy Hacker keyboard for work and save the rest for later?

I’ve started my work toward learning more about the open source virtualization software known as Xen. My target is Xen 3.0, or Xen-unstable as it is called, which I will evetually deploy as a production system at work.

Here is where I am at so far:

OpenSuSE 10 RC1’s packages don’t work properly. This is unfortunate, because I work at a Novell shop. The problem I am having are:

1. While the Xen kernel is installed at booting, new domains hang

2. Stopping a hung DomU hangs xend
3. Only rebooting clears hung DomU’s from memory

This is a problem dealing with both the OpenSuSE yast2 created images and from pulling a SLES9 image from the imaging server. I’m going to try QEMU packages from FreeOsZoo next.

Giving up on OpenSuSE for now, I pulled down Fedora Core 4 with updated Xen packages. The main bug here is that Xend doesn’t work out of the box; you’ll have to make some magical directories in /var for it to start up, otherwise it’ll go on and on about a missing file or directory.

mkdir /var/run/xenstore /var/lib/xenstore

I’m glad I archive the xen-users mailing list. Grep is my friend. The Wiki is useful too.

The next step is to try to bring up a DomU once I pull down my SLES9 image again. If it works in FC4, then I’ll play in FC4 until the next milestone in OpenSuSE is out and about or try and fail again to pull xen-unstable from cvs.