iDude.org

As I’ve stated in the past, I’ve used a lot of different hosting providers and still have services remaining at most of them in some capacity.  With Rackspace Cloud (formerly Mosso), I still have Cloud Files CDN service on standby in case I need it.   On 2-2-2010, I got an email notifying me that they have started offering Windows VPS for beta testing.  This is very exciting for me as it was one of the main features I wanted in Slicehost (which I still have 1 256mb Slice).

I setup a 512mb Windows 2003 Server to test. So far it seems to be quite excellent and fast. On speedtest.net, I got 67mb down, 27mb up. Not bad. It looks like the Windows 2003 Servers are running under XEN and the 2008 are most likely under Microsoft’s Hyper-V.  The new machine I setup did have SP2 on it, but was unpatched otherwise.  First thing I did was update everything.  The Windows Firewall is completely closed off by default at least.

I’m definitely going to keep testing it on Rackspace, but it would be nice to have one control panel and have them available via Slicehost.com as well. Even it if is an extension to the Slicehost control panel accessing Rackspace Cloud’s API. Better integration of the Slicehost offerings with the Rackspace Cloud services would help both entities since they should be one big happy family now. ;-)

I almost wish they would merge completely and integrate all the features from both sides of the house.  I’m sure that’ll happen in time as the old loyal power users move off to Linode (I moved 4 VPS to Linode) and it’ll have the least impact, churn-wise, if done smoothly.

My setup, if anyone is interested, is the following:

• 1x256mb Slicehost VPS running Cherokee/MySQL hosting ~25 sites.
• 3x360mb Linodes + 1x540mb Linode.  3 Servers are dedicated to individual customers, the other is for more sites I maintain.  Mostly running Cherokee/MySQL or Apache/MySQL.
• 1x1024mb CrystalTech VPS  running Windows 2008 for hosting email and websites for a number of customers
• 1x2048mb SingleHop Server running Windows 2003 for a few sites that wouldn’t work correctly under 2008 for a number of reasons.  This is an Intel ATOM based Server w/ 320gb HDD.  Not bad for $99.
• 2xMedia Temple Grid accounts for customer sites that need higher scalability.

If the Rackspace Windows VPS works out well, I’ll probably move the stuff off SingleHop since the Rackspace pricing is much better for me and SingleHop’s server is overkill memory and HDD wise for a few relatively basic websites and apps.

But I will say SingleHop’s services have been EXCELLENT in the year or so I’ve been using them.  No complaints at all, 0% downtime that I, or my monitoring software, have observed.  Good customer service and GREAT prices for dedicated servers.  I just don’t need dedicated servers at the moment.  If I did, SingleHop would be the place I’d go for both Linux and Windows dedicated.

CrystalTech has also been extremely reliable and fast, but the pricing is way too high, in my opinion.  $149 (including backups) for a 1024mb VPS w/ 60gb HDD when I can get a dedicated for not much more at SingleHop.

I’ll post more on Rackspace Cloud as I start using it more.

Over the past few years, I’ve become a big fan of Virtualization technologies like VMWare, VirtualBox, XEN, Microsoft Hyper-V, etc. So much so that I moved ALL my hosting operations (20+ clients) to providers like Slicehost, Linode and CrystalTech for Hyper-V.

At home, I tend to use VirtualBox from Sun. It seems to be perform the best for both Windows and Linux, although I lost the ability to Bridge the VM’s NIC after upgrading to Windows 7.

At work, I initially used VMWare Server to setup numerous VMs for software testing and platform integration testing and other fancy stuff like that. I tried for about a year to get our IT staff to start using it, and FINALLY, they decided to go completely virtual running VBox on the Solaris platform. I still use VMWare Player for a couple VMs I have left from the past, but VBox is my favorite.

XEN I did not have so much experience with since I *thought* it was more of a IT Backendish type of Virtualization software and more arcane. Perhaps it was at one time.

But regardless of my misconception, I decided to download XenServer last night and install it on one of my spare boxes. XenServer is full virtualization “OS” that you install and all the guest machines are built inside it.

Won’t go through all the details, but the XenServer was a breeze to install, only asking basic questions and for the IP address of the server. It’s best to put it on a decent machine with lots of hard drive space and  plenty of RAM and processor power (Virtualization Extensions on the CPU is a BIG plus and allows you to run Windows VMs).

On older machines, like my old Pentium D (Dual Core) machine, it does not have processor virtualization extensions, so it was not able to run my Windows virtual machines.  The Linux (Ubuntu) servers worked just fine.

For Windows ones, I used a newer Quad Core Phenom box and put 4 Windows Server 2003′s on it by using the VMWare to XEN conversion program.  Was a little buggy getting it converted, but the Citrix XEN forums helped.

There are some sites out there you can google that have XEN ready images you can upload through the XenCenter software into the server and boot.

Overall, I’ve been extremely happy with the performance of XenServer and don’t think I’ll go back to desktop type virtualization solutions like VirtualBox and VMWare Server which has a crappy, buggy web interface (last time I used it) and requires you to already have an existing OS.  XenServer is OS+Virtualization solution all-in-one.

First Install

I am usually not big on Microsoft releases, but since Vista was a disappointment and XP was getting so… old …I decided I would do something I’ve never done before.  I actually purchased a version of Windows.  Now don’t get me wrong, I have technically purchased older versions, but they were all pre-installed or re-installed through restore CDs and the like.  Basically I was good and paid the “Microsoft Tax”.

Since there are quite a few workstations in my home, I chose to buy the Family Pack, which gives 3 licenses, and installed first on my dad’s computer (No, I don’t live at home)…  Figured if Dad was ok with it, then it’ll probably be ok for the rest of the family.

His machine is an older HP a1430n purchased from the local Office Depot,  it only had 1GB of RAM, AMD 64 3800 processor, integrated nVidia video, 250GB SATA drive, a printer, Microsoft fingerprint reader, and a few other misc peripherals.   Since he was running XP on it, I was required to do a “Clean install” instead of upgrading it, which was expected.  It did put everything from XP into the C:\Windows.old folder and did a nice, fast install of Windows 7.  No problems and it was noticeably faster installing than even the 2009 RC1.

Got him booted in and went to manually copy a thumbdrive backup of his My Documents into the new Documents folder.  Nicely, Windows was smart enough to realized what I was doing and proceeded to place the My Pictures, My Videos, etc. from the old My Documents into the correct locations that Windows 7 puts them.   Nice!

Fired up IE 8, nothing new there, basically the same as IE 8 on XP.  Downloaded Firefox and Chrome and setup his Google Apps icons for email, docs and so on.

For a 60 year old, Dad is pretty savvy on the PC primarily just from using them casually over the years, so I plan to let him install his software and misc printer drivers and so forth.

The only thing that really won’t work on his setup is his Microsoft Finger Print reader for logging in.  Microsoft did not seem to write a driver for it and I didn’t try using the XP one.

I did also yank some RAM from an old machine and upped him to 3GB RAM and he’s good to go.  No complaints so far.

Second Install

Second install, it was my turn.   I have a Gateway Quad Proc AMD Phenom, 8GB RAM, nVidia 9800GT w/ 500 watt PSU, Blueray ROM drive along with a normal CD/DVD RW.  running Windows Vista Home Premium 64 that came with it.  Fired up the install and it was for the most part non-eventful although it did end up taking around 4 hours since I upgraded instead of clean installing.  It gathers all settings and files from the old OS and “moves” them into the new.  That takes forever and at times it seems like it is “locked” up or frozen at certain percentages of the process.  I just let it go, it rebooted a few times and came up.

Once in, I was sure to check for updated versions of all my utility software and Open Source things I run to ensure maximum compatibility.

A few minor annoying things I’ve noticed, in no particular order:

• Windows got sluggish a few times, which I believe was my Tortoise SVN process updating the working copy of my Repo.  Once done, I upgraded it to the latest 64 bit version and it has been fine.
• My USB ports on the front of my machine cut out a few times, not sure what the cause was, but everything seems to be ok now.
• My Multimedia card reader doesn’t seem to be working.  Windows 7 used a generic driver for them, so it may just need to be updated.
• When plugging in a USB card reader, Windows recognized it, but it could NOT read a FAT32 formatted Sony Memory Stick and it insisted on me to format it.  Luckily I did NOT, put it on my Mac and it worked fine.  Pictures SAVED!  Yay!
• External hard drives (I got 4 of them) are working OK.  One of them has been dropping out occasionally (my bittorrent drop) and Vuze gets angry.

Most of these annoyances don’t bother me too much.  Overall, World of Warcraft (WOW) seems to be noticeably faster loading and exiting, program loading is fast and I have no other complaints.

Next Install, the wife’s machine.  More to come.

Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 8.0  is just downright pitiful…  To the extreme.  After spending so much time “improving” IE8 to make it more standards compliant, it failed miserably.

Screenshot (in native IE 8 mode)

So I figured I’d try the IE 8 compatibility mode to see if it would fair any better…

Actually, quite a bit worse…

On the other hand, Safari 4 did perfect.  Granted, it is a beta, but a very functional one.  Firefox (3.0.7), Opera (9.64) and Chrome got up into the 70′s and 80′s, but still did not get it.  At least they’re trying.  Here are the screen shots for the 4 other aforementioned browsers.

I posted a lot of posts earlier this summer about my debacle at Mosso which caused me to jump ship and switch my sites over to Slicehost…  

Lo and behold, Mosso buys my new provider… *sigh*…  Can’t get away! :-)

From talking to a few Slicehost guys in their chat, they stated that everything will stay pretty much the same or get better, which I hope it will, but I’m hoping the pricing stays the same or gets lower.

I guess I’ll just be crossing my fingers over the next few months as Slicehost merges into the larger company.  I’m hoping a lot of the features that have been requested by the users can come to fruition soon.

Here is my “wishlist”… (in no particular order)

1. Ability to backup Slices (cloud nodes) into the Mosso “cloud files” storage, which will allow better backup space utilization and ability to backup the slices offsite.
    
2. True “pay as you go” for the traditional Mosso shared hosting (Cloud sites)… Instead of $100/mo, do a $5/mo base + compute cycle charge or something along those lines.  I still have a few sites on the old Mosso that I wouldn’t mind keeping there (so I can have ASP/PHP hybrid hosting) as long as it’s reasonable.  
    
3. Windows 2003/8 Server Slices at the same price point and simplicity of management as the Linux slices.  This MAY be hard to do at an equivalent price due to Microsoft Licensing… But a 1GB+ 60gb+ for under $100 including snapshot backups would be sweet.
    
4. Keep the same “small company” feel for the people who have become accustomed to Slicehost the way it is today.
    
5. More diverse data center options to help with latency problems for people in Europe or Asia, ability to choose which datacenter you want a specific slice to reside and the ability to migrate between datacenters. (Rackspace/Mosso) has datacenters in San Antonio and Dallas, TX, Herndon, VA, three in England, and one in Hong Kong.  Both of Slicehost’s datacenters are in St. Louis, MO.
6. Backbone/Redundancy increases as Slices get “jacked” into the new data centers. 
7. A la carte access to features that are offered by Mosso and Rackspace such as cloud files and traditional Mosso ASP/PHP shared hosting.

These are all I can think of at the moment and I hope the best for the Slicehost crew.  IF things go bad, I’ll probably have to switch AGAIN to someplace like Linode, but for the time being, I’m still a loyal Slicehoster.

The new Microsoft Surface technology looks pretty slick, albeit a bit expensive.  Perhaps someday, after I make a bunch of $$ on my Apple Stock (AAPL), I’ll be able to afford one. :-)

Check out this video below with a “new” voiceover.  Funny Stuff…

Last week, after much waiting by myself, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS came out. Before the release, I didn’t have the time to really mess around much with the BETAs or the last Release Candidate, but the morning it was released, torrenting commenced and went to work.

Got home, burned it to a CD and installed it on my primary Windows workstation (running Vista) using the Wubi Installer.

For those of you not familiar with Wubi, here is the blurb from their website:

“Wubi is an officially supported Ubuntu installer for Windows users that can bring you to the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other Windows application, in a simple and safe way. Are you curious about Linux and Ubuntu? Trying them out has never been easier!”

So basically, you can install Ubuntu into C:\ubuntu then when rebooting your machine, you will have another option to boot to besides Windows… The Wubi Installer by default only created a 12gb “container” for the Ubuntu installation. If you plan on actively using Ubuntu under Wubi, make it as large as you can do without, space wise, in Windows. It can get a bit geeky to add more space to the Wubi side after the fact. I didn’t realize it at the time and went with the 12gb, but then I wanted to run XP inside a Virtual Machine, which didn’t leave me much space left. I ended up Googling around and found a method to create a second Wubi disk and copy over your /home/ folder to it and changing your fstab to use it. So I had the 12gb for system stuff and another separate 25gb /home/ disk image.

The best thing about Wubi is that it allows you to test out Ubuntu on your machine without wiping out anything, no re-partitioning, no real impact on your system at all. You do take a slight performance hit since you are running this off a file on the NTFS file system, but the hit isn’t anywhere near as much as running it from VMWare, which doesn’t help if you are looking to see if Ubuntu is truly compatible with your hardware.

First Install as Desktop

Here are my basic system specs of my first install:

Lenovo something…
AMD 64 X2 3800+
2048mb RAM
250gb HDD
nVidia GeForce 8600GT XFX XXX w/ 256mb RAM
22″ Samsung wide screen @ 1680×1050
19″ Samsung @ 1280×1024

The installation was a breeze and all I had to do was set my network information to get online (I don’t use DHCP on my router).

The nVidia “restricted” driver took a few minutes to download and install due to the mass deluge of downloaders hitting Ubuntu’s (and mirror) servers. Response time for all APT-GET queries were a bit slow over the weekend. It calmed down some on Sunday and I was able to get things done quickly.

Setting up the Beryl/XGL effects were easy once the aforementioned driver was enabled, but Ubuntu leaves out the “advanced” configuration options for the effects. Again, googling around, I was able to find the “apt-get” commands to get those utilities installed.

Probably the longest thing to get working was the true dual display.

Just after installing Ubuntu, both monitors had the same output. After installing the nVidia drivers, the secondary screen dropped out, but there was no explanation for it and no setting in the display properties would bring it back. Googling mentioned a program called “nvidia-settings” which I ran and after much tinkering was able to get a solid xorg.conf created to have the 22″ monitor primary and the 19″ as a secondary span to the first.

Needing to work a lot in the Windows world, I keep a Raw XP VM Machine around that is patched (mostly) and ready to unzip and load to install the few Windows based utilities I need like Adobe Photoshop (doesn’t work well under Wine) and Microsoft Expressions/Visual Studio. Installing VMWare Player took a bit of hacking around, but installed fine. I used the secondary monitor to full screen XP while keeping Ubuntu on the primary.

Overall, things are MUCH better under 8.04 than any of the previous Ubuntus in my opinion. Googling around for things was key for me. Be sure to include “8.04″ in your search queries to limit the number of older pages from being returned. Some of those instructions are way out of date with 8.04.

Later this week, I am going to try my “dad test” on Ubuntu to see if he can handle it, I did install it on his machine, but had trouble getting his Wireless to connect to one of my many access points (He lives across the street with a WiFi repeater in his office). I think the driver is just flaky.

Might end up just putting an Ethernet bridge on his PC so it’ll just use his ethernet port which looked fine.

Second Install as Server

System Specs:
Dell SC430 Server
Intel Pentium D Dual Core 2.8ghz
1gb RAM
160gb SATA HDD
Integrated Video
17″ Viewsonic LCD

As has been usual with the later Ubuntu builds, Installation was a breeze. This time, I wiped out the parition completely and installed it directly on the box which made it very fast compared to the Wubi install above, which isn’t bad to begin with.

For this installation, I was more server focused, but did not install the “server” version of Ubuntu. I opted to use the same “desktop” version and install all the packages I needed to make it a “server”.

Doing a lot of WordPress Installations, I chose to get a Virtual host WP environment setup.

I’ve been hearing a lot of good about LighttpD lately and decided to apt-get that instead of Apache2.

LighttpD is a VERY fast alternative to Apache2 (up to 50% faster in some cases). Setting it up was as easy as “apt-get install lighttpd” (After removing Apache2).

# apt-get remove apache2.2-common
# apt-get install lighttpd mysql-server php5-cgi php5-mysql

I also grabbed PHP-CGI and did a little tweaking to get lighttpd to parse the PHP files using FastCGI which was not difficult.

# lighty-enable-mod fastcgi

Had to edit the /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/10-fastcgi.conf to get my paths correct.

Googling around gave me the conf file lines I needed for the Virtual host config:

For a single hostname like yourdomain.com

$HTTP["host"] == "yourdomain.com" {
server.document-root = "/your/www/path"
}

for anything.yourdomain.com use this…

$HTTP["host"] =~ "(^|\.)yourdomain\.com$" {
server.document-root = "/your/www/path"
}

Put as many as you need in there. I used a spare domain and pointed *.MyDomain.com over to it and setup a few virtual hosts to test them.

Restart Lighttpd using:

/etc/init.d/lighttpd force-reload

I had a LLMP (Linux, Lighttpd, MySQL, PHP) server setup and ready to go.

Download the latest WP files:

curl http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz -o latest.tar.gz

Uncompress them to the virt root of your choice and be sure to chmod the folders correctly so WP can run the setup and create the wp-config.php file.

To make Permalinks (friendly URLs) work, just add this into the lighttpd.conf before (or within) the virtual host directives…

server.error-handler-404 = "/index.php"

This will allow the permalinks to work correctly, mod_rewrite rules are not necessary.

There may be a little more to all this than the above instructions, depending on your configuration. The information provided was to just provide basic guidance.

My plans are to eventually backup all the WP blogs on host on my dedicated server and curl them over to this Ubuntu box, uncompress them, drop and restore the databases and have a mirror of them offsite from the dedicated server in case anything ever happens. This should be easiest enough to do in a few hours in one script file on the server to do the backups and database dumps into one compressed file, then another cron’ed script on the local Ubuntu to curl it down and restore everything. If anything ever goes wrong, just change the DNS for the domains and point them to my local Ubuntu which can be DMZed on my router. :-)

Looks like a cool phone, but I think Microsoft stuffed a little too much into it!  Although they will pay you $125 to take it off their hands. :)

Check out the specifications, courtesy of Amazon.com…

I recently ran across a “new” (to me) virtualization software that is very similar in function to VMWare workstation.

I downloaded Innotek’s Virtual Box software, which quickly and painlessly installed, seeming to be a little faster to install than VMWare and MUCH less bloated… The entire self-extracting install is only 13.3 mb. I restarted my XP (Media Center) laptop and created a virtual machine with 512mb RAM, 64mb Video memory (I don’t remember VMWare having this feature), and a 10gb Virtual HDD, which should be more than enough for a CDR of Xubuntu 7.04.

I am typing this from the Xubuntu installation right now. I just got done installing the “VBoxAdditions” which are basically contains the same enhancements that VMWare tools offer. It was also much simpler and easier to install in Linux than VMWare tools. After I reboot, they should become active.

So far, this Virtualization product seems very stable, and is free for personal and evaluation use. I didn’t see any pricing structure on the website for companies, but I’m sure it would be reasonable.

My brother and I both recently, over the holidays, attempted to install the final Vista RTM and here is a brief entry on our findings.

My brother’s laptop is a nice higher end laptop from Alienware, it has a desktop class PC processor in it and runs XP better than most desktops.

He started the install, it took a while to go through all the hardware/software compatibility tests, but FINALLY, after about an hour, started the install/upgrade process.

The install completed sucessfully and when it came to boot time, crushed our hopes of getting Vista running on his machine that night… He basically kept getting a BSoD (Blue Screen of Death) due to a bad modem driver loading, even though the laptop’s modem is disabled.

During his install, I started the install, using the same version of Vista on my Toshiba Qosmio, which is also a high end laptop that has a gig of RAM, an nVidia 6600 Video card and decently powerful processor, although not as fast as the Alienware.

My install also went sucessfully, but took about 3.5-4 hours to upgrade XP. It was about 2:30am and I restarted it to boot for the first time…

It was looking promising, no immediate BSoD, but it just stayed at the “sliding bar” loading screen. After entering safe mode, I noticed it kept locking up on the CRCDISK.SYS driver which has to do with the IDE/SATA bus in the machine. Googling it confirmed people were having trouble, but I found no simple solution.

ONE KUDO: Microsoft at least had an OS rollback feature that would restore XP and get rid of any trace of Vista, which I did and am now back on XP.

CONCLUSION: I AM VERY disappointed with Vista and hope others have better luck.