While researching a very technical question, I ran across this blog:
http://projectdream.org/wordpress/
Of course, the first thing I did was search for the keyword I was googling – only later did I scroll up and read the top post.
I hope that something similar would happen to my blog if it came to that…
–Nat
So, yeah, this is a widespread thing.
Basically, we’ve got 25 year shingles failing after about 10 – out and out failing.
We’ve filed for our share of the class action lawsuit, the shingles, pictures and supporting documentation should be on their doorstep tomorrow. Let’s hope it all goes smoothly!
–Nat
For quite some time, the blog has been running as an Ubuntu VM running in VMware Server on Windows Server 2008. If you said “yuck!” – you’re right. It is a decidedly 2009 setup that I wanted to update before a rapidly developing new Juchems makes working on projects like this a luxury.
Moving to VMware ESXi means that I will necessarily have the VMs running much closer to the hardware for better performance, and the most recent release has good support for many newer operating systems as VMs. It will also be quite “headless” – no monitor, keyboard or mouse needed for 99.99% of the life of the server.
Perhaps the nicest part of using VMware Server vs ESXi was that it was an “all in one” solution where I could work on VMs etc without installing anything on the rest of my computers. The downside was that it wasn’t particularly speedy, updated for newer operating systems and had one too many levels of “stuff”; VM/VMware Server/Windows OS versus the new VM/ESXi setup.
The “Old” hardware:
AMD 5400+ x2 (2.8Ghz dual core)
8GB DDR2 800 Mhz (4x2GB)
Gigabyte nVidia 430 Chipset ATX motherboard
160GB Seagate 7200.9 (160 GB Western Digital Raptor died a year ago or so…)
Onboard video & LAN
The “New” hardware:
Core i3 2100 (3.1ghz dual core + hyper threading)
8GB DDR3 1333 Mhz (2x4GB)
Gigabyte H61 mATX motherboard
250GB Samsung Spinpoint (will be joined by a 750GB Western Digital Green shortly)
On-CPU video/Intel Pro 1000 NIC
The old case, Seasonic 330W power supply and fan setup was kept as-is.
Having ESXi 4.1U1 install without much issue was quite a relief. The onboard nic was not detected with the built the default ESXi driver set, but the Intel nic was obviously picked up without any hassle.
I think that 8GB is a sweet spot with a dual core processor. More RAM and I would have felt an urge to go with a quad core – and spend more money. The motherboard only has two ram slots so I am safe from that temptation. I think that I’ll be able to run about ten vms on this guy, what they would all even be I can’t imagine right now. Five with good performance will meet my needs for the foreseeable future.
The Migration
I copied the VMs first locally to my main workstation and then tried to simply upload them to the ESXi server. This resulted in a scsi error when I tried to power them on – failure. The next step was using ESX Standalone Converter to change the VMs from “workstation” to “server” VMs and I have to say that this tool from VMware works great in that regard.
The Ubuntu VM was stubborn in the fact that eth0 had the static IP configured but the new network card was known as eth1 so the blog was down for an additional ~20 minutes while I sorted that out. The Server 2008 R2 VM moved over easy peasy but needed a VMware tools update.
All in all I was pleasantly surprised at how well it went. TeamJuchems is now hosted on a completely modern hosting platform that should offer plenty of performance for the foreseeable future.
–Nat
What really makes money in our Information Age? Software. What’s the best way to sell software? Sell a hardware device that only runs your software. Apple, and their tens of billions of dollars in revenue each month is a poster child for this line of thinking. The xbox 360 and PS3 are even better examples of hardware sold for a loss initially in order to lock in consumers for software sales.
HP could have gotten in on the pie if they had been a little (a lot?) smarter.
Just recently, last Friday, HP decided to stop making phones and tablets using an operating system known as “WebOS” that they acquired along with its creator Palm about a year ago for $1.2 billion. WebOS is similar to iOS (iPhone, iPad) and Android in purpose but offers a few unique features like multitasking, for which it was built from the ground up. In getting out out of the business, HP decided to take a huge hit on their Touchpad (iPad competitor) hardware, essentially writing it off to the tune $100 million, and sell it at epic price points of $99 and $149.
Just like that, their Touchpad became the tablet to get. It couldn’t move at $400 (16GB)/$500 (32GB) but boy did people overload HPs website and beat each other up in Wal-Marts over it at this price. It is a bit ironic that the day HP announces the end of the product that it becomes an item that no one can keep in stock. It’s likely that the active webOS 3.0 userbase grew by an order of magnitude over the weekend, no joke.
They question becomes – why didn’t HP take a loss to move the hardware in the first place? Remember at the beginning when we talked about how software makes the world go around anyway… not to mention $40 cases and $70 “touchstone” chargers. If the Touchpad would have come out at say, $150 and $200 based on capacity it would have been nearly as a big of a hit and would have attracted 1)many buyers and then 2)many app creators and then the classic 3) profit.
Instead, HP thought that for some reason people would buy their tablets at iPad prices despite lack of brand recognition (webOS? wtf?), lack of apps, and hardware that is not freaking blessed by Steve Jobs. It was born to be a loser with that plan.
No wonder HP stock dropped 20% on last Friday, the leadership of HP showed everyone just how dumb they really are.
–Nat
=)
Pictures of Baby Gabe are now up on Google+ – and there are some interesting differences in posting to facebook versus the big Plus.
Facebook allows for “High Quality” (no re-sizing on upload) pictures so long as you don’t mine waiting 10x as long for them to upload. Google, on the other hand, offers no choices and re-sizes them.
Google allows for super granularity (per album sharing configuration) in its permissions via Circles, Facebook you set your permissions on your entire wall and not a per album basis.
Google will send a link to an email address whereas Facebook simply lists a public/share-able URL at the bottom of each album page.
High quality uploads are a big deal to me – I may want those pictures later. Google is very fast, however… It also appears that as a Google+ member you get unlimited storage (via Picassa) for photos smaller than ~2020*2020 whereas non Google+ members only have that for photos 800*600 and smaller – which is an incredible quality difference.
It appears that for the meantime, until Google+ allows for higher quality uploads and sharing, I’ll be doing my primary photo sharing via FB and the blog.
–Nat
So I underestimated the drudgery of changing my DNS settings for the blog, clearly. I also learned the pain of the “nx” record – what your DNS cache retains if it fails to hit a site the first time.
Basically, I messed up the “www” registration – I made it a “CNAME” versus an “A” record. If that goes right over your head, I obviously won’t think less of you. 😛 Anyway, since it was messed up and it failed DNS servers all over the globe cached “www.teamjuchems.com doesn’t exist anymore, don’t look for it” – essentially that “nx” thing I mentioned before… so we all had to hold our breath and wait for that record to expire.
Let the rejoicing commence – www.teamjuchems.com is back!
–Nat
Since EveryDNS, the nice, free DNS hosting site was sold out to a company that now wants some $20 per year (!) for DNS hosting I had to find a new home – back to xname.org I went. Surprisingly, my cedarvalleycomputing.com domain was still alive there. I wiped that, uploaded my teamjuchems info and killed off my EveryDNS registration. I have updated GoDaddy and such, but if you don’t have the site in your DNS cache you may experience an outage.
I am just hoping it works later tonight and I don’t have to waste more time mucking with it.
–Nat
I heading to bed last night when I noticed that I had not shut the screen sliding door on the entrance to our deck (sorry Kristin) and so many bugs had been drawn to the light. Here my new work PC background:
It is pretty cool how they can just stick to glass like that… I also liked how the top and bottom of the image was slightly blurred, bringing focus to this guys “face.”
–Nat
Everyone once in a while I am surprised by a TV show. I just started watching Castle and hey, wouldn’t you know it is pretty fun? I am hoping that in Season 2 (just clearing Season 1 now) that they encourage some cases that are a little bit more overarching, solving one crime per episode is safe but I think they have the material to reach further.
In that aspect it reminds me of Fringe – a show that started (and sometimes reverts to) a creature feature (one mysterious issue resolved per show) and now is telling an epic story line. Perhaps a crime show can’t quite pull that off… but I think they can do more. I guess I have couple of seasons to watch and find out!
Oh yeah, and it is nice to see that Nathan Fallion can actually be a multi-season show. Just sayin’.
–Nat
I was over at ArsTechnica this morning for my daily dose of Information Age news (holy crap VMware, that’s a crazy licensing change!) and I saw that the opposition to the Lighting Effeciency Act (or whatever the attempt by the Federal House was making to repeal a law from a few years ago that mandated that light bulbs all get 30% more efficient) had failed. This made me happy as it provides for a way for our nation to become more energy efficient in a way that everyone can participate in.
What surprised me (why? I don’t know…) was the opposition to the original bill. The Federal Government has no business regulating light bulbs, they say. On MPR on the drive home Tuesday I heard a clip of Rush Limbaugh on his radio show saying that legislating away choice on light bulbs is un-American. Hmm.
Well, I consider myself a good libertarian, and I thought that this was an interesting quote in response to claim that “the government has no business legislating what kind of light bulbs I can buy”:
“I am in many senses a libertarian but I am sick and tired of this argument, it does not hold water because what I consume in terms of energy can have a negative effect on other persons without their consent, I should therefore as a good libertarian actively try to minimize my impact on other persons lives as much as I can, because if I do not at least try, then I am morally corrupt, reprehensible person that does not live as I learn.”
Wow, so I can get behind that statement.
Argument #2 for me of why this is necessary:
Too man y people can’t (or won’t)do the math for themselves. A good CFL or LED bulb will easily pay for itself and energy won’t be getting cheaper any time soon. Just because an incandescent is cheap upfront does not make it the best deal and some people can’t get past this.
This isn’t to say I don’t have incandescent bulbs in the Juchems household. We have been replacing them as they die – using them anywhere (outside, where in the Winter they take a minute or so warm up), in our kitchen, etc. but not in the theater room because they don’t dim nicely. I am truly hoping we can ride our current CFL and incandescent inventory until LEDs become more cost effective.
Finally, the government does subsidize the crap our of our energy grid, so if they identify a way to get a better return on their (our) investment, by all means, that sounds pretty pro-American to me.
With this out of the way, maybe they could talk about the debt ceiling or something that actually pertains to the long term health of our nation in a very critical way.
–Nat