Savannah W-ITS

Need a real person (honest consumer) feedback/reaction to your product or service?
Need a  quick turn-around?  Don’t mind a disruptive user?
As my schedule permits I am happy to review products with either a public or private review.  The caveats:

formal or open-ended reviews (your format or mine.)
real time (review written/updated as the product is used) or summary [...]

A recent cracking (an illegal access of computer systems and data) of Twitter related data-in-the-cloud (my reference when using tools where data is used and stored on a remotely hosted system) is in the news.
It seems that some bad person decided to guess the passwords of some users with Twitter relationships (employees or family members [...]

NOTE – I am a disruptive user – I typically explore new(er) technology offerings in a manner that vendors might not prefer so please note that your mileage should vary, especially if you are a non-disruptive user…

Xen?  I thought that Xen = Citrix?

Yes and no…   The Citrix product line includes technologies developed/derived from the Xen Open Source project. 

I get vendor emails on a daily basis – I usually ignore the web links that they contain…

Today, I accepted the invitation to visit Sun’s Web site.  While there, I happened upon an Open Solaris VDI download (~2GB compressed image.)  After downloading just uncompress, import into your VDI disk image selections, create a new Open Solaris type virtual machine (VM) and

If global economics were a computing system where the heck is THAT SA?

So what is radical about current trends in computing, economics and US politics?  **

Google-define:radical – revolutionary: markedly new or introducing radical change…

Are any of our recent economic, political or computing changes anything more than a natural evolution?

Are we seeing YAPS (yet another paradigm shift?)  Physical to virtual to ethereal?

Politics

The US political scene is

Start by creating your virtual machine image (including installing your OS of choice) – in my example this is Source.VDI.

Duplicating a virtual machine (VM) image with Virtualbox is simple but requires using the command line:

VBoxManage clonevdi  Source.VDI  New_clone.VDI

The time required to clone a VirtualBox image (VDI) is  dependant upon the size of the your VDI image and the processing power of your computer system.  The cloning process  creates

Since the VMware install under Fedora 9 was problematic and since there are other kernel related problems (random seg-faults with Fedora 9) I decided to try VMware under Fedora 8 (2.6.26.5-28.fc8.) The now familiar install process went smoothly. In less than 10 minutes the install was completed, and the VMs created under Vista were installed and ready for use.

It should be noted that VMware Server 2.0 does NOT explicitly list Fedora as a supported OS for VMware Server 2.0; while the install seemed to be ‘normal’, I could not get all of the required processes to run and I could not logon to the web console. I also could not locate any error messages pointing me to a solution.

This seems to be a topic of interest so here is a bit more information about using Cobbler to provision Linux systems under VirtualBox. The steps are fairly simple and allow you to use virtual NICS to reach your Cobbler server. To use this information you need: a) a system with an operating Cobbler install and b) Linux VMs configured within VirtualBox.

I first looked at virtualization several years ago – it was beyond, or rather the hardware was beyond my exploration budget so I moved on. Current PCs under ~$1000 are quite capable of running multiple OS instances (especially with new VM-aware CPUs and an adequate amount of RAM and disk space; my 6 GB system can run a primary OS using ~1GB or less of RAM (under Linux) and ~2GB of RAM (under Vista.)