gary’s web sofa

I’m repurposing an old-ish Dell PowerEdge 850 as a VMware Server development & test box at the moment. It’ll be replacing an even older PowerEdge SC400 (where “SC” stands for “super cheap”). It was running Windows 2003 Web Edition quite happily, but I’d rather stick a stripped out Linux distro on it to get the last bit of performance out of it.

The server originally came practically free with some disk arrays we bought a while back so I wasn’t expecting the best, but was still slightly peeved when I saw it only had a CD-ROM drive, so my copious quantities of DVD+/-R media were useless. Off I went to my local mirror and downloaded the “ia 64 netinst” CD image and I burned it to my last CD-R. I bunged it in the drive and hit the switch and it booted straight into Windows….. I tried a bootable Windows CD and it booted off that fine. Hmmm. So I Googled and found this. apparently if you want to use an E64MT CPU you need the AMD 64 bit install CD, rather than the ia64 one, which only works on Itanium CPUs. I’m off to the shop now to buy more CDs.

Re: Debian Installer on DELL PowerEdge 850/860

 VMware recently announced the first beta of their free low-end VMware Server 2. It is a beta, and as such the sensible part of my brain tells me to stay away and let someone else take the pain. Unfortunately the gadget & gimmick loving part of my brain made me install it on my mail/web/everything else server that had a perfectly functioning v1.0.4 setup. Bad idea!

Version 1 has this very nice web UI for monitoring, starting/stopping, and tweaking stuff, and a separate Windows/Linux application for creating new VMs and accessing the console of each one. Version 2 has dispensed with the application and instead relies on a beefed up web interface, with a browser plugin to display the consoles. Unfortunately being beta, the web UI is ugly and unfinished, and there’s so much un-optimised debug code the VMs run at less than half the speed they did on the old version. I run Debian Linux web, email and SyncML servers, a Windows XP desktop, and the odd test Linux VM, all on a single 2.4GHz Celeron Dell server that I got for free. Obviously the beta had to go…..

Rolling back the server and toolset installs was a bit long winded, but it was straightforward enough. What wasn’t straightforward was un-scrambling the network config. Each VM has at least two interfaces, usually bound to the host system’s wireless interface (I keep the server in my garage, where I can’t hear it, so there’s no Ethernet out there) and a “host only” LAN for NFS, backups etc. The reinstall remapped everything arseways.

VMware Server 2.0 Beta – VMware

At work we used to be a small operation with very few documents and it was nice and simple to keep everything straight. I, as the CTO, am the keeper of all the operational procedures, network diagrams etc, and Pierre (our marketing guru) manages all the sales and marketing documents. The company web server runs a CMS called Joomla, which has a decent enough file manager, so we put the documents up there in a password protected area when they’re complete and we want to make them available to selected clients.

We’ve started to grow, both in head count and sophistication, so now we’ve got a lot more documents to manage and a lot more people wanting to manage them. Our documents are usually authored by one person, but in many cases require review and comment by sales, marketing and technical people prior to release. What would be great is something that would manage the workflow, with notifications and audit tracking, and integrate with our website to make the final result available to clients, all in a controlled manner. We need a Document Management System. Our company likes to use open source software wherever possible, so my first port of call was Google, which gave me the following:

• xinco
• contineo
• KnowledgeTree
• Epiware
• Alfresco

Most of the above are Java applications, which I really don’t like, and I’ll cover in a later blog post. KnowledgeTree is written in PHP and ticks all the boxes. Alfresco is a Java app, but it’s functionality is too good to dismiss straight away. Let the testing begin!

Back in the old days phone and fax was king. E-mail was nifty gimmick, but nothing more. All you needed to do to provide e-mail to your users was to give them access on their desktop. You could get away with draconian inbox size limits to simplify your storage and backup requirements. An outage of a couple of hours was no big deal.

Because of this we had loads of different options if you needed email. You could use an “enterprise” platform like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and the like, or you could roll your own with any number of SMTP, POP or IMAP servers running on Linux (my preference right now is Postfix & Dovecot running on Debian).

Now days you can’t easily get away with the DIY approach. E-mail is has to a large extent replaced voice & fax as the prime business communication method. We need to support huge inboxes, instant delivery of messages, access on the road, and near perfect uptime and backups. Most of these things can be achieved with any modern email setup, however some require a little help from outside.

Remote access is a major requirement these days. An executive feels naked on the golf course unless he’s got a Blackberry, a Treo, a Symbian or a Windows Mobile smartphone on his hip (mine is a Nokia e61). You’ve got three options if you want to get email onto these things:

1. Scheduled checking of a POP/IMAP server: It works, but there’ll be a delay because the message doesn’t get pushed to the device as soon as it comes in.
2. Blackbery Enterprise Server: Native support for Blackberry units, and add-in support for other platforms. It only supports Exchange, Notes, or GroupWise servers though
3. Microsoft Exchange Direct Push: Native support for Windows Mobile units and add-in support for other platforms. Only supports MS Exchange servers obviously.

The other major issue is how to back them up. You not only have to worry about DR backups, but also compliance. A nightly backup isn’t good enough any more. You either need to run a continuous backup or run a parallel archiving solution.

At issue here is that the remote access and backup requirements require 3rd party support. 3rd parties target their efforts where they’ll get the most business, so There’s no support outside the big three (Exchange, Notes & GroupWise). Nobody’s deploying new Notes or GroupWise installations anymore, so as much as I hate to say it, Exchange is the only option if you need to provide effective remote access and require effective backup.

The company I work for is very dispersed. As well as staff in Ireland, we have people in the UK & France, so need good CRM and collaboration tools. Up until now we’ve been using vTiger and MediaWiki, and they’ve served us well. There’s always a need to improve communication and interaction with our partners, so we’re looking to add more support and service tools to the mix.

I came across OpenPsa recently and it seemed perfect for what we do. It’s a CRM tool with heavy project management and document repository tools that could be perfect. It runs on a LAMP stack, so I don’t need to dedicate a server (or VM) exclusively to it, like I would do if it was a Java app.

The one thing I always look for when choosing an Open Source product is the commitment of the developers. I’ve been burned in the past by committing to platforms only to find that the lead developers have no interest in improving the product or fixing the bugs. The most recent posting on the news page was a link to a blog entry of one of the lead developers on a Saturday stating that the 2.0 release was coming out the following Monday….. That was last May. He has updated his blog since, but no mentions of OpenPsa in any of them. There is no updates since about developers falling out, selling out or dropping dead. It’s the software equivalent of the Marie Celeste. Too bad. I’d have loved to play around with it.