JDPFu.com 2012

My old backup method was a little cumbersome. To ensure a good backup set, I’d take down the virtual machine, mount the VM storage on the host (Xen), then perform an rdiff-backup of the entire file system, before bringing the VM back up again. This happened daily, automatically, around 3:30am. It has been working for over 3 years with very few hiccups. I’ve had to restore entire VMs and that has worked too. One day I needed to restore the Zimbra system ASAP. From the time I decided to do the restore until end-users could make use of the system was 20 minutes. That’s pretty sweet in my book.

There are some issues with the current setup.

• Backups are performed locally, to a different physical disk before being rsync’ed to the backup server. This is necessary because the backup tool versions are different and incompatible between Ubuntu 8.04 and 10.04 LTS servers.
• Each system is completely shutdown for some period of time during the backup process. It is usually 1-4 minutes, but still that is downtime.
• Most of the systems are still using 8.04 paravirtual machines under Xen. A migration of some type is needed to a newer OSes. I should use this opportunity to make things better.
• Some of the systems are running old versions of software which are not up to current patch levels. I guess this happens in all IT shops. None of that is available outside the VPN, so the risks are pretty low.

think I can do better.

Since this is a technology blog, I figure some of you may be interested in a major change that happened out of necessity here today.

This is the very first blog article on our new physical server, running in a completely different virtual machine. For the next week, everything here is a test.

Due to some sort of outage issue earlier today, I was forced to upgrade everything involved with this blog. I had attempted to perform this upgrade previously and failed. As you can see, this time, there was success. Nobody was shocked more than I.

Below is the 6th of 6 questions from a reader. I definitely don’t have all the answers, but I’m not short on opinions. ;)

Previous articles:
Part 1 – LVM+JFS+RAID | Part 2 – Service Virtualization |
Part 3 – Virtualizing Media Storage | Part 4 – Hosting Email |
Part 5 – Reverse Proxies

Laurens Duijvesteijn asks:

Q6: It seems desirable to be able to VPN in to my network at any time, if I decide to set up said service, does any device in my internal network need to connect before it is discoverable?

Sorry, but I don’t understand the question entirely. Discoverable? That confuses me. This isn’t a game console. Your VPN client and server will need to know about each other explicitly. Not to worry, that isn’t very difficult to setup. There are just a few details.

Below is the 5th of 6 questions from a reader. I definitely don’t have all the answers, but I’m not short on opinions. ;)

Previous articles:
Part 1 – LVM+JFS+RAID | Part 2 – Service Virtualization |
Part 3 – Virtualizing Media Storage | Part 4 – Hosting Email

Laurens Duijvesteijn asks:

Q5: Do I need a reverse proxy if I ? I’ve read about proxy servers on TheFu’s blog that filter internal traffic (if you read this, in the end I liked the idea a lot more than at first). Is this even the same thing? If this is to happen, is it correct that I’d need two NICs and bridge the connection from the router to the internal network? If so, can I get rid of the router? We do use it for telephone access too.

Below is the 4th of 6 questions from a reader. I definitely don’t have all the answers, but I’m not short on opinions. ;)

Previous articles:
Part 1 – LVM+JFS+RAID | Part 2 – Service Virtualization | Part 3 – Virtualizing Media Storage

Laurens Duijvesteijn asks:

Q4: Maybe I’ll host the email for my own domain, what do I have to know? (ISPs, configuration, internal mail)

Below is the 3rd of 6 questions from a reader. I definitely don’t have all the answers, but I’m not short on opinions. ;)

Previous articles:
Part 1 – LVM+JFS+RAID | Part 2 – Service Virtualization | Part 3 – Virtualizing Media Storage | Part 4 – Hosting Email

Laurens Duijvesteijn asks:

Q3: I intent (sic) to provide quite a lot of media to my internal network, if I choose for virtualisation, will the VMs be able to access the disk space outside of the container? I do not want to create TB size containers (or should I?). I will probably use the SMB protocol here.

Below is the 2nd of 6 questions from a reader. I definitely don’t have all the answers, but I’m not short on opinion. ;)

Part 1 – LVM+JFS+RAID | Part 2 – Service Virtualization | Part 3 – Virtualizing Media Storage | Part 4 – Hosting Email

Laurens Duijvesteijn asks:

Q2: I read everywhere about Virtualisation, should I directly install packages to the base system to provide services, or should I virtualise all services? What are the advantages here?

Advantages of Virtualization

The list of advantages is long, but with those advantages comes a few disadvantages. I cannot hope to point out all the advantages, so I’ll limit it to just the main ones.

This weekend, my 3 yr old VirtualBox VDI storage for this, my primary virtual machine, was getting close to 100% filled. It was a 10G partition that started out as a 6.06 installation, then was upgraded to 8.04 and finally to 32-bit Ubuntu Server running 10.04. To get a GUI, I added LXDE a few minutes after the 10.04 upgrade about a year ago. So as I wanted to start a new development project leveraging PerlBrew to manage different versions of entire Perl versions, libraries and CPAN modules, I knew the little space remaining would not be enough.

I did a little research before I began. The web pages that I found seemed to be taking the long way around to solve a fairly easy issue. They wanted users to download some tool, which was completely unnecessary. Anyway, below the shortest, easiest, way to increase the available storage in a VDI-based virtual machine.

It is possible to run the Android development environment inside a KVM virtual machine. Below is how.

A nice article on Lubuntu_ … Lubuntu is my current desktop and has been for a few years.

Not Just for Old Hardware

The article implies that Lubntu is only for old hardware. It isn’t, though it does work well on P4 systems with 1GB of RAM (my Mom’s). It is worth checking out, even on current, modern hardware like mine, a Core i5 with either 6GB or 8GB of RAM. My daily laptop runs Lubuntu in a virtual machine with 1.5GB of RAM and 10GB of disk. It runs nicely on all these systems.

Other Options Besides Lubuntu

If you really want a small, light weight Linux, check out TinyCore. Sure Puppy and DSL are options too, but with TinyCore, you get to load the apps that you want and completely control the amount of excess storage and RAM required.