Views, News and Cheers!
Sunay posted a new whitepaper on crossbow documents page. This is a good read. It discusses the key data structures, data flows and the overall architecture in a very concise way.
Imagine the scenario: You have a server that you installed ESX server on. You configured it for your local network. Then you shipped the box to a remote location. Someone in the lab connected the box to a switch. There is no human present when you are working on the system remotely. How do you reconfigure the network parameters?
In my case, for this DELL servers, I used DRAC to reach out to the box. Then I logged into the system and reconfigured network using esxcfg-vswif. The network interface that needs to be configured is vswif0.
The instructions are well documented here. The only piece missing is the edit of /etc/hosts, if the IP address at the old location is configured there (too).
[ Backlog post from March 12th]
I visited Sri Vishnu Engineering College for Women on 12th March. This visit is scheduled just 24 hours before my travel and my initial idea was to talk about OpenSolaris and its features. Once the students are assembled, I came to know that about half of them attended a prior talk of mine on overview of OpenSolaris. So I had to switch to an impromptu talk and covered the following:
There are not many questions, but their response to my questions is very good. They know what is “redirection of a unix command to a pipe” and “the ports Sun’s Application Server binds to by default”. Impressive.
Here are some pictures from the day.
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| SVECWMar2008 |
This year’s Day 03 of Sun Tech Days, the community day, is better than last year. Ian Murdock‘s talk is a good curtain raiser for a great day. I initially planned to roam around in all the tracks, but the continuous high activity in OpenSolaris day didn’t let me do that. This year, the attendance is close to a total of 300+ and we had a sustained crowd of 150+ most of the time. Sunay‘s talk on Project Crossbow brought up some very good real life questions from the audience. So did the talks on Cluster technologies and virtualization. The community for sure is catching up here.
We also had a session of HOSUG at the end of the day. At this time, we are inviting memberships to HOSUG. If you are interested, please sign up using the participation instructions here. Help this community grow!
It is fun and technology again. No time to take photos. Shared some ideas, issues, tools and tricks with my OpenSolaris buddies and some of the attendees. More socializing with Sun folks. Interacted with more attendees and suggested hints on the best ways to learn (a) OpenSoalris, (b) Java technologies. There are some in depth discussions on virtualization, types (and the good, bad & ugly) of hypervisor technologies from Sun and others.
Had to shorten my visit today due to other commitments in the evening. Short, yet sweet!
I installed a CentOS5 guest on OpenSolaris desktop using VirtualBox and played with it a bit. The installation process is smooth. The hard disk and partitions are hidden well by VirtualBox from anaconda, thus making the entire installation process very simple. Even the network configuration, display card configuration, etc. are very simple and straight forward.
I had a crash of the OS and the virtualbox while playing with several tools on CentOS, but could not reproduce it again. Well, it sounds okay for a beta-1 build. Tools like browsers, network monitoring tools etc. worked very fine on the guest OS. I may look around for Windows and other OS DVDs. That would overload the host OS and helps me see the performance impact.
I liked the way mouse capture and keyboard capture are toggled. Overall, it is impressive.
Installed VirtualBox on a OpenSolaris Desktop. The OpenSolaris build of VirtualBox is still in beta, so you may need a couple of hacks to keep you going.
First, download and install the package as root user. The package gets installed in /opt and you don’t have a choice to keep it somewhere else, unless you tweak a couple of things. The installation is a fairly simple process.
bash-3.00# gunzip VirtualBox-opensolaris-amd64-1.5.51-r28040-beta1.gz
bash-3.00# pkgadd -d VirtualBox-opensolaris-amd64-1.5.51-r28040-beta1
The wrapper script for Solaris is not fully baked yet. So if I run the VBox.sh, it will fail with errors.
bash-3.00# sh -vx /opt/VirtualBox/VBox.sh
#!/bin/bash
.
.
.
.
+ which ./VBox.sh
APP=./VBox.sh
APP=${APP##/*/}
./VBox.sh: bad substitution
bash-3.00#
Running /opt/VirtualBox/VirtualBox will fail too, for the want of qt libraries, etc. So set LD_LIBRARY_PATH and then run the command.
bash-3.00# export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/VirtualBox:/opt/VirtualBox/qtgcc/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
bash-3.00# /opt/VirtualBox/VirtualBox
Don’t play with the tool yet, unless you have a few GB of spare space in your root partition. By default, the tool will create a .VirtualBox directory in the user’s home directory (in this case, it would be /) and keep all the configurations and OS images in the form of .vdi (Virtuo Disk Image) files. Like this:
bash-3.00# find /.VirtualBox/
/.VirtualBox/
/.VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml
/.VirtualBox/xpti.dat
/.VirtualBox/compreg.dat
/.VirtualBox/VDI
/.VirtualBox/VDI/CentOS5.vdi
/.VirtualBox/Machines
/.VirtualBox/Machines/CentOS5
/.VirtualBox/Machines/CentOS5/CentOS5.xml
/.VirtualBox/Machines/CentOS5/Logs
/.VirtualBox/Machines/CentOS5/Logs/VBox.log
/.VirtualBox/Machines/CentOS5/Logs/VBox.log.1
bash-3.00#
So unless you have a few tens of GB in / partition, don’t go further. Use the following hack instead.
Find a partition that has reasonable space and create a hardlink from root partition. In my case, I have ample space in /export/home, so I did this.
bash-3.00# mkdir /export/home/VirtualBox
bash-3.00# ln -s /export/home/VirtualBox /.VirtualBox
Now you can start playing by executing /opt/VirtualBox/VirtualBox . All the best!
Interesting use case of integrating KDE/GNOME (Linux) and XP (Windows) menubars into one screen. Using SeamlessRDP.