Sun, 21 Mar 2010
Giving Cloud Computing An Edge - LOSUG March 2010
The LOSUG seems to
be the user group with the least cross over of attendees that I go to. It
seems to be a three part mix - Sun engineers going along to meet co-workers
and get the external eye on to what's happening in different parts of the
project, Unix people with dozens of years of experience who want something
technical and interesting that matters on the server and people that
don't listen to the speaker and then ask questions that, quite frankly,
they should be embarrassed over. It's hard to stress how much I've
always enjoyed the talks at LOSUG but some of the questions are just...
insane.
Right, now I've got that of my chest - and I'll probably get lynched for it in the future - back to the March presentation by Alasdair Lumsden. I'm not going in to details about it as you can read the Giving Cloud Computing An Edge slides yourself now. It was an interesting talk and provided a nice counterbalance to similar talks I've heard in the past about Xen and UML hosting.
What made this LOSUG different to all the others though is that things are changing. Sun's always been very supportive of LOSUG (and always willing to put their hand in their pockets for food, drink and speakers) and now that Sun is owned by Oracle the group will be less driven by the core organisers. You can find more details (and less of me putting words in peoples mouths) at The Future of LOSUG but I wanted to take this chance to both encourage people to come along and show Oracle that the group's important and to say thank you to Joy Marshall, James MacFarlane and Stuart Smith - who have month in and month out organised an excellent event with speakers you couldn't see anywhere else.
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Posted: 2010/03/21 19:30 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
I'd never even heard of this book until Bob used its name in the same sentence as the excellent "Cisco Routers for the Desperate". However while that book is about hands on practical Cisco advice Network Ninja is all about the theory - from IP addressing to routing protocols.
While no one's ever going to confuse 200 easy to read pages with the Stevens books this slender volume is an excellent refresher for the experienced admin who doesn't do too much to the network on a day-to-day basis or for the less experienced admin who wants to know some of the why instead of just the command lines.
An enjoyable and opinionated book that covers a lot of ground in a low page count. Only let down by some bad editing - 7/10
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Posted: 2010/03/21 18:58 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
LibguestFS GLLUG Talk
Over the years there have been a handful of GLLUG members
that have given so many interesting talks that I'll always turn up to watch
them - and Richard Jones is
definitely in that short list.
The website does an excellent job of explaining: "libguestfs is a library for accessing and modifying virtual machine (VM) disk images. Amongst the things this is good for: making batch configuration changes to guests, viewing and editing files inside guests (virt-cat, virt-edit), getting disk used/free statistics (virt-df), migrating between virtualization systems (virt-p2v), performing partial backups, performing partial guest clones, cloning VMs and changing registry/UUID/hostname info, and much else besides." but it doesn't quite convey how cool it is to spin up access in to a windows machine in a handful of seconds and then dump out the registry key you're looking for - all from a Linux command line.
Oh, and even if you didn't turn up (tsk tsk) you can read all about the libguestfs gllug talk here.
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Posted: 2010/03/21 18:12 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
The Book of Xen - Short Review
Although I've been a big fan of virtualization for many years I've
mostly been a VMWare man. UML
was good for the time but VMWare workstation and GSX always seemed to be
better solutions - and they had the benefits of dealing with Windows. At
$WORK we looked at using Xen for our new development environment but it
never felt very finished, little things like needing to compile your own
dhcp client in order to get PXE booting working always felt very wrong.
But now we're looking to move away from VMWare server for certain parts of our infrastructure everything's back on the table so I went looking for a guide through the lands of Xen in the modern world - and I think I found an excellent one in The Book of Xen.
The book takes you through all the aspects of using Xen that you'd expect, from installing it, configuring the guests (DomU in Xen terminology) to making the most out of the networking options and local storage possibilities. Where it goes that extra mile is in sections like 'Beyond Linux', which guides you through using NetBSD and Solaris with Xen, Profiling and benchmarking under Xen and Lessons from the trenches, in which the authors (who run a Xen hosting service) tell you about their real-world aches and pains.
Apart from the chapter on the commercial Citrix XenServer, which I can understand the inclusion of but isn't useful to me, there was something interesting in every chapter. After working through the book I have a good understanding of what needs attention in a Xen hosting setup and what might be weaknesses. All I need now is a similar book for KVM so I can avoid doing all my own research!.
An excellent guide to Xen that brings a lot of useful material into one place - 7/10
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Posted: 2010/03/21 18:01 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
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