The Archives

GPF, Miscellaneous
Blog Server Upgraded
June 13th, 2009 (9 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core

It case you missed yesterday’s tweets, the jeffdarlington.com server has been successfully upgraded both to Fedora 11 and WordPress 2.8. The GPF server is next, although I haven’t started that effort and it’s bound to take longer. I’ll make a bigger deal about the downtime for GPF when that upgrade draws closer.

Let me know if you encounter any problems with the new site.
GPF, Miscellaneous
Upcoming Server Maintenance
June 10th, 2009 (9 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core

Just a quick heads-up to anyone who cares, but I’m in the process of upgrading the blog server’s operating system from the creaking and decrepit Fedora 6 to the shiny new Fedora 11. I’m doing most of this work on a totally different virtual server, which I’ll then backup and overwrite this virtual server with the new image once its ready to go live. In theory, there should be only a minimum of downtime when the actual overwrite occurs. However, I’ll probably end up closing comments and such temporarily right before the flash to make sure the database stays in sync. I don’t have a time frame for when the actual flash will occur, but it should be in the next few days.

As an even more advanced warning, GPF will be getting the same upgrade (only from Fedora 8 ) once the blog server is stable. The blog comes first because (1) it’s running on the older OS and thus theoretically more vulnerable due to its venerable age and (2) it will serve as a test bed to make sure the upgrade process moves relatively smoothly. I tend to be much riskier with the blog server because it’s less important to my livelihood, so it gets to be the guinea pig for these sorts of experiments.
Technology
Virtualization is cool!
November 26th, 2007 (2 years, 3 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core

Okay, so the subject line kinda screams “I’m a n00b!” But at least it’s true.

I had a new task added to my plate recently. We’re in the process of consolidating some servers at work, moving some of the work to virtual machines using VMware. Like just about everyone one else in the tech industry who hasn’t been living under the PDP-11s, I’ve heard all the hype about virtualization and how it’s going to revolutionize everything there is to revolutionize. Naturally, the idea sounds cool. Who wouldn’t want to create a “virtual computer” living inside their current hardware that you could simply delete and recreate as easily (almost) as if you were working with a simple text file? Of course, all I’ve really been exposed to until recently was the hype, and maybe what little I know about virtual machines and emulation that I’ve picked up from playing with Java, MAME, and DOSBox.

Well, I was recently assigned the task of creating a new virtual Linux box (openSUSE for the nosy distro snobs out there) to serve as our new source control server, using primarily Subversion and Trac. (Yes, we’re a Microsoft shop using Open Source source control and tracking tools. I enjoy the irony too.) It was a bit surreal firing up VMware and creating this new, clean slate to install upon. You specify what type of virtual processor to use (and how many), how much memory and disk space to allocate, and click the start button. Hello, BIOS! The setup took a bit longer that I expected (mostly because we downloaded packages from an online repository instead of just downloading the DVD ISO) but within a few hours I had a brand new openSUSE “box” ready to go. I’ve been configuring it off and on for several days now, setting up SVN and Trac and finding the best way to migrate our existing projects over without losing any ticket or module ownership data. But the wildest part of it all is that once I’m done building this thing, I can just export the virtual machine files to the new, final host and kick it off again, and it’s as if the machine had always existed there. Surreal, I repeat. Surreal.

About the only thing keeping me from creating a blue billion virtual computers around the house is (a) time and (b) system resources. (I doubt I can justify leaving that many virtual machines running at once.) Geek fun!