Well, it seems official. David Tennant will no longer play the Doctor after the series finishes the 2009 season. It seems that all of my favorite series are coming to a close, with nothing good to replace them with. I realize that Doctor Who will continue on with a new actor to play the Doctor, but will he be even as close as good as Tennant was?
All we’ve got to go on now as SciFi fans is the rumored political spinoff of Stargate. Oh, and maybe True Blood. I really wish I was kidding 
Well, I’ve had a functional ESXi server up and going for a little over two weeks now. No apparent stability problems to be reported. The kernel itself is a memory pig though, much larger than the licensed version of ESX Server. ESXi is ~700MB res, while ESX is 200MB, ouch. So, I had to upgrade my RAM to 4GB. No big deal, RAM is cheap for that box anyway. At the peak of my testing, I had 10 windows VMs running concurrently (Don’t worry, I have collected that many XP licenses over the years. Sad, eh?). They had very little to no performance degredation when opening applications or doing interwebby type stuff, it was kinda nice. Yesterday I nuked all of the VMs, but just because no sane person would have that many windows machines in their house, virtual or otherwise. Next up, I’ll throw Gentoo and Rosetta@Home on there and see how ESXi holds up. That should be really interesting.
Never would have guessed that on-disk temporary tables are that bad for performance. Peter over at the MySQL Performance Blog shows otherwise.
So, since I’m a total hardware monger and VMWare just released the ESXi hypervisor for free, I thought I might give it a shot. This was two days ago. I have two boxes at the moment that were just sitting around, a SuperMicro 1U server with a P4 1.8 (yawn) and an HP Pavilion desktop with a dual core P4 in it. So, I gave the SuperMicro a shot. Apparently, to my dismay, the SuperMicro had ACPI problems, and ESXi barfed during the install. After that, I tried to install it on the HP, with more success. The only problem was that ESXi is very limited as to what kinds of network cards it will support (probably because engineers are lazy and don’t like to port kernel modules to VMKernel, or because ESXi wasn’t meant for a hobbyist market). I tried a Realtek 8139, 3Com 595C-TX, SMC, Via Rhine III, and a D-Link before I decided to drop into the tech support console and rummage through ESXi’s dirty laundry. Apparently, instead of the service console, they have a stripped down BusyBox console. Which is fine, I guess. I like the RedHat SC, but people have to have some reason to upgrade to ESX Full aside from VMotion and DRS. Poking around under /mod, I found that there were only a handful of mostly on board NICs supported (same driver names as linux… thats… coincidental.). One I did find on there was an e100, which I knew I had lying around somewhere. I finally braved the horrors of The Closet and found one buried next to an old DEC 10/100 NIC. Awesome. Installed, rescanned the Management Network, and away I went.
Now, when I say this isn’t a hobbyists virtualization HV, I mean it. It has decent performance I guess for the particular hardware (it is a desktop, afterall), and I’m mounting my VM store off of NFS, so thats going to slow it down a tad. Not to mention, that e100 has been around since before the world was created, so network performance is going to suffer a bit.
All in all, I like it. Its not Xen (it doesn’t have the speed), but I guess it makes up for it with the Virtual Infrastructure Client. Eventually, I may try it on some enterprise class hardware. If I can ever find any OTC.
For a while now, I’ve been using Velocix to accelerate my blog. Velocix is a sort of Content Delivery Network, much like Akamai and Limelight technologies. The difference between Velocix and the others is that the basic package is FREE. FREE as in “I just found a dollar in the street” FREE. Why use a CDN for a blog? Well, you never know, tomorrow I could have a stroke of genius and end up on Slashdot or Digg, and then my server would get hammered. Better to let Velocix take the load than my VPS, right? And besides, its always nice to see a startup that has a fresh look at older ideas. I haven’t done a whole lot of research on the subject, but as far as I know there aren’t a whole lot of CDN’s that use BitTorrent as a peer distribution protocol. That’s Neat. Neat with a capital “N” Neat. The management portal is nice and speedy, and they have log file downloads in W3C format available in case you’re a hit monger. The one thing that would be a cool feature would be an FTP site where you could pick up your log files, and maybe for the paying customer scheduled automated log deliveries to FTP and SFTP sites. I’m not sure if any other CDN offers SFTP log delivery, but if there are any companies out there going for PCI compliance, its a must (seeing as how FTP is a horribly insecure protocol). Well, I’ll go for now, but I’ll leave some screen caps of the Velocix portal to wet your whistle. Go over and sign up for the basic account. It can’t hurt to try! (no, Velocix didn’t give me incentive to post this, either. It’s unbiased.)
If you’re going to be using Drupal with mod_security, making the following changes will probably save you some frustration later 
.
<LocationMatch “/”>
SecRuleRemoveById 960010
SecRuleRemoveById 960015
SecRuleRemoveById 960032
SecRuleRemoveById 950107
</LocationMatch>
Also, set SecResponseBodyLimit and SecRequestBodyInMemoryLimit to something like 51200000 and 12288000 respectively. They may seem a bit high, but if you’re managing a lot of Drupal users and permissions I’ve run into problems with them.
Happy Drupal-ing.
Last night before I went to bed, I realized I have the same problem that alot of people who share my technolust have. That is, if we have a blog, we spend more time hacking on the code than we do actually posting things. Which I guess isn’t such a bad thing, but in my case I really needed somewhere I could throw stuff about all of the projects and things I’m working on, without going “Gee, I bet I could add this feature really quick” or “Wow, you know what would be cool? let me add this feature!”. I just want somewhere I can dump my ideas/whatever and not have to fuss with anything. I still have a special place in my heart for BlogUnknown, and also feather (which I’ll eventually get to work), but for now this blog is going to stay WordPress only. I’ve got it fairly locked down anyway, so I dont have to worry about the masses, and plus, its shiny. Ooh. Shiny.
