Have you ever wondered if you could own a domain like a iam.john as your personal website? There are groups of people working for non-profit entities that control what we are allowed to register as a fully qualified domain name. These are called Top Level Domain Names.
This is a full list of Top Level Domains you can register on sites like Godaddy.com or eNom.
Stay tuned for more information on why these are important…
Nexenta Community Edition is here!
I consider this to be the first real entry for Nexenta into the SMB market because it allows for system builders to create entry level NAS products. Hopefully they focus their efforts over the next year on building an easier to use product. At this time the product is most definitely only supportable by high level engineers.
Looking for a solution to deploy Apple OS X across a network of computers? Looking for a solution to manage the software on those computers even if its not Apple software?
Looking to do this for free without licensing? Look no further.
Deploy Studio does all this and more. Check it out today for the missing admin pack for OS X.
While the Virtualization project has come along very nicely we are now embarking on a CIFS/SMB ZFS Server that has real time failover in case of failure. This project will make use of OpenSolaris, ZFS and GlusterFS to provide the storage cluster with high availability similiar to Heartbeat/DRBD in Linux.
We will be keeping this blog up to date as we progress.
Proxmox VE 1.6 was released! This new version of Proxmox includes a new version of DRBD for high availability virtualization clustering out of the box.
Talk about it in the Forum
Read the Release Notes
I am experimenting with using our new ZFS NAS as a backup dump for the virtual machines we will be hosting in our cloud. To make backups of phone systems regularly I need to create them without causing downtime for customers. Enter the LVM (Logical Volume Manager for the Linux kernel), with this I can resize volume groups, resize logical volumes, and create snapshots of logical volumes. Proxmox 1.5 includes a tool for interacting with LVM to create a snapshot of a Proxmox guest while it is running without causing downtime.
After testing a couple different commands I found this worked as expected and created snapshots of the entire machine without taking it offline.
vzdump —dumpdir /zfsnas/backups —snapshot 101
The ATI ES1000 is a popular server graphics card today but it doesn’t work out of the box with OpenSolaris. After booting the LiveCD into VESA mode I was able to see the GUI but once installed OpenSolaris revers back to automatic detection of the X11 configuration on boot.
To fix the problem I recommend installing OpenSolaris using VESA mode from the LiveCD then ssh’ing into the server from another machine to create a VESA mode for your server.
Follow these steps in Terminal to make the changes necessary:
ssh username@server-ip-address
We need to elevate to root with the su command for the next step, you will need to type in your password to proceed. This will run the following command to start creating the xorg.conf file within the nano editor.
su nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf
After that write the following into nano:
Section “Device”
Identifier ”Card0”
Driver ”vesa”
EndSection
Hit Control + X to close nano, when it asks if you want to save press enter and it will save the file.
Now that you have saved the file you need to restart gdm to see the changes take effect.
pfexec svcadm restart gdm
With that you have completed the changes and your server will now make use of the VESA driver.
Today we added Comments to each of our posts, now any visitor can contribute to the conversation.
I’ve spent about 2 straight months looking at ERP solutions for our internal use and I’ve also been comparing what I call ERP frameworks for the basis of some custom development that we are undertaking in the near future. After literally hours upon hours of reading, installing, reinstalling, and abandoning some initial attempts I have a better understanding of what ERP options are out there. I’d like to attempt to save others who are searching for a solution some time and give you my experience and opinion on what I consider to all be viable options. I am going to break this into a few posts since there is a lot to cover.
So far I have compared the following solutions which are all open source with commercial support offerings or commercial version releases:
My ideal criteria for an ERP system would be that:
I’d also like to note early on, that if you want to test, develop, and put something into production with a stable partner, I highly recommend Slicehost.
Using their hosting for this research has saved me approximately 40 hours on installation time, as I have tried many different flavors of Linux for my research. Their support is outstanding and their IRC channel is great as well if you need help from their community. I believe that it is always worth mentioning good partners and I highly recommend checking them out.
More on ERP solutions tomorrow.
If you have anything on a server that you haven’t backed up now would be a good time to start that before you wipe it for this project. To setup a RAIDZ array with ZFS on an IBM System x3650 we need Open Solaris to see the individual disks attached to the system. In order to accomplish this we first need to initialize all the disks in the IBM 8k ServeRAID Controller for their new configurations. This blog will be continuously updated with improvements we make as we create/learn.
I created a RAID1 array for the boot partition of the server with the ServeRAID 8k card, I will assume you know how to do that as these instructions will not cover that. To host virtual machines from this server I will need to create a RAIDZ array for the storage.
After loading the configuration screen you should select the Array Configuration Utility.
To proceed with the drive initialization select the Initialize Drives option
*IMPORTANT* Repeat this step for each drive on you want to use in the RAIDZ Array.
Select the drive you want to pass through from the RAID controller to the operating system.
Proceed forward and you will see an error telling you that the data will be destroyed. Then you will see an initializing disk screen:
You will be taken back to the main menu, this time select create array:
The next screen lists the drives for the array, time to select the drives for our RAIDZ array.
The array type will be Volume and it will pass through that single volume.
When all is done my screen looks like this:
Now repeat these steps on all the drives you want to use in a ZFS Array on an IBM System x3650 server. If there are any problems with this setup in our testing phases I will update this post.
Pictured above are servers to be used in a VoIP Phone Service Cloud.
This blog will document the process we take to configure everything to be delivered at our datacenter. When the work is done we aim to have a High Availability Linux Cluster using Proxmox, DRBD, OpenSolaris, ZFS and Asterisk.
There may be parts of this project we don’t achieve in the first part of the setup and configuration.
Twelve HP DL385 G1
Although there are some limitations with the processors in these units they will function well for our purposes as Virtual Machine Hosts.
Two HP Proliant DL380 g2
These will serve as Redundant PFSense Firewalls configured for us by Chris Buechler and his amazing team at BSD Perimeter.
One IBM System x3650
This will serve as our ZFS SAN if the IBM Serveraid 8K controller will cooperate with our configuration requirements for Open Solaris.
Three HP Proliant DL380 G4
One IBM Xseries 336
One IBM Xseries 346
These will serve as Windows Servers for our Buddy Engine project NeedleBuddy.com
There will be more coming soon!
1 year ago
