gary’s web sofa

VMWare Server includes the ability to only allocate disk space on the host system as needed. For example, if the virtualised system has a 8GB disk but only uses 4GB, then the disk image only takes up 4GB. While the disk image will expand as required, it won’t automatically reduce. The VMWare Tools application allows you to shrink it back on demand, but it’s a GUI app, which is fine if you’re running Windows, or Unix/Linux with X, but sod all use if you like to run your Linux VMs as lean as possible, without X.

VMWare Command Line Tools from VM Back is an unofficial open source command line version of VMWare Tools that enables you to shrink your disk images and sync your clocks on any Linux, DOS, BSD or Solaris VM.

I’ve finally got it down to a 5 minute process with the help of the OpenNMS docs….

Install a bare-bones Etch system by skipping the role and package selection screens during the installation.

Edit the apt sources.list to include the “contrib” and “non-free” packages by adding the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ etch main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ etch main
deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main

Run “apt-get update” to get the package list up to date.

Run “apt-get install sun-java5-jdk” to install Sun Java

The JAVA_HOME environment variable needs to be set for any Java app to run so adding the following to /etc/profile will do the trick

JAVA_HOME=”/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun”
export JAVA_HOME

Run “apt-get install tomcat5.5 tomcat5.5-admin tomcat5.5-webapps” to install Tomcat

Run “apt-get install wget unzip” to install wget so we can download jbilling from the server, and unzip so we can decompress the archive.

“cd /opt” and run “wget http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/jbilling/jbilling-1_0_6.zip” to download it and “unzip jbilling-1_0_6.zip” to decompress it.

Edit /opt/jbilling/server/default/conf/jbilling.properties to suit.

Run “chmod 700 /opt/jbilling/bin/*.sh” so we can start and stop the server easily.

Run “/opt/jbilling/bin/run.sh” to start the service and then open http://<IP_Address>/billing/signupEntity.do?action=setup in a web browser and follow the Getting Started Guide here.

Dovecot seems nice. It’s simple to setup, it’s secure, and it’ll run on any old POS computer, but server side filtering setup is poorly documented. If I only accessed email from a single computer, or all email I receive is of equal priority then it wouldn’t be a problem. I do not need to see mailing list traffic when I’m on the road, so it should be automatically be transferred out of my inbox into a folder that I can check less frequently.

This is easy as pie to set up in any desktop email client, but I check my email on the move with my Nokia e61, on my laptop when I get a chance to sit down, Outlook, Thunderbird, Outlook Express or Evolution when at one of my work desktops, and webmail everywhere else! Therefore I need the emails to be sorted on the server, before they get downloaded to an email client.

Sieve seems to be the tool of choice, but you have to compile it from source on Debian, which defeats the point. People use Debian because of it’s package management. I log into each of my servers each week and run “apt-get update;apt-get upgrade” and I know everything gets brought up to date. Having to manually track a specific application’s release cycle and bugs just makes things messy.

The search continues….

Courier-IMAP is nice, but a bit over-engineered for what I want. Dovecot is nice and simple, and doesn’t insist in having all the other email folders under the inbox, which is nice. The main reason I’m switching over is security. It supports TLS by default. The thing I like about Debian is the ease of finding howtos on the net. I googled for “dovecot +install +etch +howto” and this page was the first hit. A complete idiots guide that even I got it right first time and had everything up and running in 15 minutes.

I’m setting up a VM on my VMware server to manage network backups. Asigra Televaulting is an agentless backup client that stores the data on offsite disk rather than on tape or local disk. Your backups are pretty useless if they burn up in the same fire that destroys your PC. The idea is for the VM to be in suspend until needed, thus not impacting performance of the other VMs. A command in the crontab will resume the VM in time to hit the schedule. I’ll then use Asigra’s pre/post job scripting functionality to suspend the VM when the backup is finished.
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