I’ve been watching this space for a while, and I continue to find it frustrating. Virtual Computer’s NxTop was one of the more promising platforms to develop into what I’d really like to see this area of computing become: a type 1 virtualized environment capable of running multiple operating systems simultaneously (much like the existing server virtualization environment) with the ability to display consoles for the running guests (which is lacking in the existing server environment), and perhaps eventually provide direct guest access to certain devices such as video cards to achieve maximum performance from that component. XenClient/XCI was the other promising platform in this area, so hopefully Citrix does see this as an opportunity to develop and build out a product (hopefully without leaving open source behind… I see a lot of advantages in being able to run something like this at home too) rather than just an opportunity to swallow some competition and further entrench the VDI model, which I find immensely unpalatable.
And then there were three – NxTop Enterprise morphs to XenClient Enterprise | The Virtualization Practice
Posted May 25, 2012 By Landis Vsoftflowd – fast software NetFlow probe
Posted May 14, 2012 By Landis Vhttp://www.mindrot.org/projects/softflowd/
Keep in mind for Linux-based infrastructure.
Security Intelligence and Big Data | raffy.ch – blog » Advanced Network Graph Visualization with AfterGlow
Posted May 14, 2012 By Landis Vhttp://raffy.ch/blog/2012/03/24/advanced-network-graph-visualization-with-afterglow/
Slick use of AfterGlow for log analysis.
Things You Should Do Immediately After Launching a Website
Posted May 14, 2012 By Landis VGood list of tips to improve the site. Hit a couple of them that were very convenient, and will “immediately” get around to the other ones at some point in the future, to be determined. Will try to keep these in mind as I work on other projects as well.
MythTV, XBMC, misc.
Posted May 11, 2012 By Landis Vhttps://help.ubuntu.com/community/MythTV/Install/Server/Backend
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=MythTV
Seriously, can’t Mac just use Ctl+V/Ctl+X/Ctl+C? Thought they had a “control” key as well, in addition to the poison apple and the cloverleaf. Guess I’ll have to check.
After a bit of a hiatus, getting back into MythTV a little bit. This time, just going to set up backend on a PC I always have running anyway, and as noted in the second link, run XBMC as a Myth frontend. Since I finally bought a TV from the modern era, I ordered a video card with an HDMI output and am thinking I can get an XBMC set up as a frontend so we can DVR the very small handful of shows I actually kind of give a damn about watching.
I’ve also been doing some research and playing with Joomla, as it seems like it may be a better platform for my most recent web endeavor than WordPress. As much as I like WordPress and am relatively comfortable with it, there are some layout things that I think would take additional work in WordPress that I can just do or use a plugin for in Joomla. I could probably make WP do what I want, but I think I’d probably have more time in that than I would in learning Joomla and implementing the plugins I need to deliver the experience I’m looking for. Plus, without digging into the backend and really building an understanding of the platform, I’m not comfortable with my ability to build out the changes I want securely. At layer 2 or 3 of the OSI, I have enough experience to trust my judgment, even cross platform. At layer 7 (8?), I question myself a little more. I’m not comfortable in situations where I can’t trust my own judgment.
Devil Linux serial console
Posted May 8, 2012 By Landis VI’m a fan of Devil Linux. It’s the first distribution I encountered that, by default, has no ports listening when you boot it up. As you might expect, this does hint at a less tailored fit in a desktop environment (in most cases), but is a great base for a network appliance.
As an appliance, many times it’s handier to be able to just jack in a serial cable from a laptop or an aux port than to cart around a display, keyboard and mouse. Unfortunately, the live CD by itself doesn’t provide that console access. However, if you have saved a working configuration to storage media, it seems to be fairly trivial to do this – caveat emptor, I haven’t run full tests natively, only after running install-on-usb and installing to local disk media using syslinux with console option.
After running install-on-usb as noted above, I had serial access to the system once the boot was completed and the login prompt displayed on the real console. I proceeded to lose this access by replacing the etc-mods.tar.bz2 with my live configuration, and figured then that the changes must be contained within the saved mods. Here’s what I added back to regain console access (adjust your serial port name as necessary for your platform):
- To the end of /etc/inittab, add:
S0:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -L 9600 ttyS0 vt102 - To /etc/securetty, add:
ttyS0
Don’t forget to save-config – reboot (reinit?), and you should have a working serial console. Lots more room to play and improve these, but this is sufficient for my needs at this time and may help someone else down the road.
How to SCP a path with spaces
Posted May 8, 2012 By Landis Vhttp://www.thingy-ma-jig.co.uk/comment/7122
I’ve needed this a few times and been lazy about it. Finally got around to looking it up. Quote the path and double-escape the spaces… I’d have never just guessed it, though maybe would have figured it out if I had spent some time reading through the documentation. Thanks, Nick. Saved me a huge chunk of time there.
