Well, as some people already figured out; yesterday was my birthday. Chrissy noted it on my blog, as well as about every channel we’re together in (so did Chris); so thanks a lot for that 😉
Anyway, Saturday morning as I was forced to head downstairs due to my aunt calling (that was at 9am), my brother managed to take a shot at the presents as well as something else:
… I’d break a butterfly on a wheel … I was coming out of the office, and found my car this way:
As Mike wrote about his experiences with hardware vendors, I’m gonna devote this here post to my favorite software company in the world. We recently bought two copies of a software called “2X Application Server Enterprise Edition“. As one would think from reading the specs of the software, it’s near a Citrix solution (which it is, at least for a small part); but in return it’s faaaar away concerning the price. Just so you get an idea, about what I’m meaning with “faaar“:
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Windows Server 2003: Standard Edition: 2 * 91,00 CAL: 50 * 6,00 Terminal Server CAL: 50 * 17,00 ___________ 1.332,00 |
The above are fixed costs, you need them anyway as both Citrix as well as the 2X solution is only working *on top* of Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services.
Now, here’s the real comparison between 2X Application Server & Loadbalancer and Citrix XenApp Platinum Edition:
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2X 2 * 1510,00 = 3.020,00 Citrix 50 * 393,00 = 19.650,00 |
While 2X is licensed per terminal server, XenApp is licensed per user. As you can see from the above prices, the 2X solution is roughly 1/6 of the Citrix XenApp solution.
Well, it’s April. And usually when it’s April, there’s April’s weather. In the morning I was rather surprised by the weather.
And after I picked up Michel, we some when arrived at work (that is one hour later), we had our own adventure park in front of the work place:
Apparently, the trees in at the entrance collapsed (thanks to Michel for the pictures), so we had to make our way through somehow … was rather funny way to start the day … *shrug*
Well, we do appear to be having some strange load problems with our main TYPO3 box hosting several home pages of the local universities, as you can see below.
We repeatedly tried to figure out which of them was the one responsible, but neither I nor the other Unix sysadmin knew a better way to figure out the load each TYPO3 installation was causing (since there ain’t no phptop or something similar). But since today the new semester started, we figured it might be good to finally figure which one it was. And a few minutes (as in one or two) wouldn’t be much of a problem compared to the advantage we’re getting out of it.
As a comparison, here’s the “normal” load for the last week:
So as a last resort (because of said load problems), we simply deactivated one vHost after another, until the load started to relax. Unsurprisingly it was one of the installations that had problems before. Let’s see whether or not the people over at said university are insightful or not … 😆
Well, as we do have quite a few custom built RPM’s, I was searching for a new solution to manage the repo(s). Currently I do have a single repository per distribution.
One thing one needs to know about createrepo (from createrepo), it doesn’t support this type of thing in the first place. So I had to come up with another way of doing it. First, I created a proper layout (much like the Debian Official Repository layout):
As you can see, this is gonna get tricky in regards to managing the RPMS in a single place, while keeping the distributions apart.
So I went ahead, rewrote the script that perviously managed our two repositories for SLES 9/10. The limitation I pointed out above (keeping the RPMS in a single place), is easily overcome by using bind-mounts (sure it looks messy).
Now the only problem I’m still facing is that createrepo isn’t even looking at the excludes when it’s called by the script. But if I pass the raw command line the script is calling on a simple shell, it works like a charm .. So I don’t have the slightest clue right now, why in gods name it ain’t working … 🙁
Well, after a loooong time of trying to get the modules and all the other stuff (read: init-script for the guest daemon and modules) working, I think I’m about there.
I finally fixed a long-standing issue, with the postinst/prerm scripts, and the tools should be about ready. Gonna try and send it Daniel Baumann’s way (that is the Debian Maintainer), for proper inclusion into Lenny.
I (successfully) tried splitting the Xorg parts from the “normal” open-vm-tools, as I usually don’t want Xorg installed on *any* of my virtual machines. Thus leaving me with open-vm-tools, open-vm-modules and open-vm-toolbox (and open-vm-source) as a list of packages one could install.
… that’s the question. I’ve been thinking lots and lots about my involvement with our “beloved” distribution.
I talked to some of the users (that is Gordon), some fellow developers (hello Christina, Łukasz, solar, Jorge, Anders) about whether or not I’m actually still wanted and/or needed. Turns out, the collective opinion is, that I am fun to have around (*shrug* don’t ask me why, I don’t find myself particularly funny/amusing) and that’d I’d be the person to have around.
That being said, I still do have some things on my agenda (they haven’t changed .. like getting healthier – as in heading to the gym; getting a better paid job; getting my own life; getting some friends), which are going to jockey with those Gentoo interests.
As the guys over at FreeWyseMonkeys demonstrated with JoinDomain.zip, it ain’t hard to integrate a Windows XP Embedded system into Active Directory.
You basically need this:
Everything else is already present on the Windows XP Embedded systems I’ve seen. Then let’s get it on !
First, copy over the netdom.exe to your XPe, and then run the following command:
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netdom.exe join /d:barfoo.org /OU:"OU=Thinclients,OU=Computer,DC=barfoo,DC=org" %COMPUTERNAME% /ud:Administrator /pd:P@ssw0rd /uo:Administrator /po:P@ssw0rd /verbose |
Here as a note:
After that, you just need to reboot, Et Voilà! the system is present in your Active Directory. Just be aware, if you’re using a localized Windows XP Embedded by Wyse, make sure to contact your fellow Wyse Support, as the is a bug with the MUI stuff needed for the domain logon.
Also, as yet-another side note: The default Administator password is mentioned in this Knowledge Base entry.
Well some people apparently completely *don’t* understand the use of a backup client like dsmc, additionally they don’t seem to have the slightest clue on how to draw up a “clever” backup solution.
Lemme describe the situation for you. We do have two Solaris systems at work, housing our mailing system(s). Now apparently, people are unable to install the Tivoli Storage Manager Client on Solaris (or get it working properly – which people are blaming on the software not working).
Now, they draw up this insane plan … We do have about 900GiB of mail space, which is currently located on our SAN. So people decide, they don’t want the backup client on their system, as it’s slow (which I do agree to, dsmc is *slow* for large amounts of data – especially if it’s 900GiB in 15MiB parts).
So they think of something like this:
So much for *well* planned backup solutions ……… 😆