Music Free Tech

I switched to Fedora 14 on my laptop a few weeks back. It’s been working great but there’s no package for the Password Gorilla which I use to keep track of passwords. Fortunately, installing from source is easy. yum install tk itcl Now that the prereqs are installed, we can grab the source. I checked out the code from the git repository but you can get the tarball. Since gorilla is a TCL app, there’s nothing to compile.

While trying to get System Center Configuration Manager to install a package on a new server, I rediscovered why I hate working in Windows and why I like PowerShell. I wanted to check the end of a series of log files to see what was going on. Unfortunately, Windows has no obvious analog to the unix tail command. Fortunately, my friend Jon Angliss had most of a solution. Get-Content <filename> -wait That’s close to what I want but not quite.

I recently set up a IPv6 tunnel with Hurricane Electric’s free tunnel broker. Once your tunnel is created, HE provides instructions for setting the tunnel up on your system. Easy peasy. I decided that I wanted to setup a tunnel on my laptop. That’s a little tougher since my laptop will be getting a dynamic IP from the various wireless networks I connect to. Even more fun, since most wifi networks I connect to in hotels and airports, etc.

One of my problems at work is that I always want my mail and chat windows visible while I’m working. Sure, I could set up multiple windows and hope they stay where I put them. But it’s a pain to set those windows up every time. Since I’m using mutt for email and irssi for chat and instant messaging with bitlbee, I thought, why not use screen to organize the windows and, as a special bonus, I can pull up my session from anywhere over ssh.

There are a number of ways of using RT from within emacs. A quick google search will find them. Here’s what I use. RT First, you’ll need to snag a copy of the rt perl script from /opt/rt3/bin/ or from the source package. This can go almost anywhere on your local system but I put it in $HOME/bin/. Make sure you make it executable. Next, create $HOME/.rtrc. This will contain the information rt needs to access your RT install.

I spent a couple of days a while back trying to figure out why I was seeing bizarre bridge and network errors in my KVM host’s syslog and a VM that only two of three NICs worked at a time. Turns out that there is a very simple fix for both problems. First, let’s start with the KVM host network configuration. Here’s the basic config for a host with two NICs.

One of my criteria for choosing a virtualization platform is that it had to run Windows and Linux guests. Linux, of course, works out of the box on most VM hosts. Windows is a whole other story. The good news is that Windows Server 2003 and Server 2008 work just fine on KVM. There are, however, a few weird things that I’ve noticed so I thought I’d share some of them with you today.

I thought I would take a few minutes and share some of my experiences with Linux KVM. In this first post, I’d like to share some things about live migration. First, live migration works great … if you have the right version of KVM. Kvm-69, which is included with Ubuntu Hardy, is broken. Starting with kvm-70, live migration works again and works very well. You hardly even notice at all if you’re logged into the machine remotely while it migrates.

We’re in the process of trying to virtualize our data center at work. I was given the task of testing and evaluating the various VM technologies. I have to say that I am not impressed. VMWare ESX Let’s start with the big player in the VM world, VMWare ESX. The Banner team uses ESX for a few of their servers. ESX stood head and shoulders over everything else that I looked at.

Ok, I have to get this off my chest because, 1) it drives me fracking bonkers everytime and see it and 2) I want a place I can point people at when they ask why this is a bad idea. What I’m talking about is the excessive number of HOWTOs that think it’s a good idea to use the same home directory for all virtual users. Most of these HOWTOs discuss using postfix with courier, but I have seen courier-mta HOWTOs that do this too.