technology, internet oddities & other random stuff
Archive for December, 2006
Xen again
Dec 22nd
Hmmmm…. Not as easy as it looked. We’ve got a driver issue. My ADSL router is in the kitchen, and my server is in the attic, and I don’t like running cables. I get around this with wi-fi. Unfortunatly Xen’s modified CentOS 4 base install, which the VMs run on top of doesn’t support the wi-fi cards I use.
Now installing a driver on Linux is more involved than Windows. If the driver is supplied as a binary, it needs to match the exact version of the OS kernel. Not a huge problem if like Windows the kernel changed once every 4 years More >
XenSource in da hizzouse!!!
Dec 12th
Xen, the open source competitors to VMWare have just taken a huge leap forward. Up until now they were acknowledged as having the fastest virtualisation platform on the market. You could have several virtual servers running on a single physical server and even transfer them to new servers if you wanted to do repairs or upgrades without having to interrupt services.
Installation and management of the open source version was a bit on the tricky side, so a proper company, XenSource, was formed by the development team to add some polish and make it easier to deploy and manage. They’ve finally More >
Debian woes…..
Dec 7th
Debian is lovely in all but one respect….. It’s a problem as far as I’m concerned, but I’m probably in the minority. An internet connected server needs constant updating, both for security updates and functionality improvements. The standard release cycle of software vendors doesn’t fit that. OS vendors have a major release (Version X.0), and the only changes they make between releases is for security (version X.1, X.2 etc.). This means that I’ve got major headaches, including significant testing and down time, when version X+1 comes out because several fundamental changes are going on at the same time. This release methodology More >
