Open Source (SolengTech)

Open Source (SolengTech)
OpenEmbedded is now OE-Core at Linux Foundation, System Builder is now Mentor Embedded Linux at Freescale, Hudson-ci is now Jenkins-ci, Fedora 15 is out, figured out how to make Ubuntu 10.04 do NFS4, Ubuntu 11.10 is just out ... and it's time to update the Open Source section.

A Desktop Cloud to do the above is:
- 8G Fedora 15 physical machine running libvirt,
- 1G FC15 VM with FusionForge,
- 1G Ubuntu 10.04 VM with Jenkins (public),
- 1G Ubuntu 10.04 with Jenkins (private), and
- 2G-4G Jenkins slave VM's that go on and off as needed.

With 3T of disk space I'm not thinking about that storage, but the 8G of memory means I have to think about memory. My theory on memory is that spending any more than the CPU can use while going really fast is not worth the cost. The CPU may have memory, but it can't do all the work and is running as slow as if it didn't have memory.

At some point, the CPU can't plow through all the memory, so for this AMD 6 core machine, I thought 8G of fast CAS7 memory was a good choice - it wasn't. CAS7 yes, but 16G is needed now.

Old Computer Rule: The CPU is eventually going to slow down no matter how much memory it has. So buy enough so the computer can do everything at a reasonable speed, and the money you save put into faster memory that will make everything go faster. Memory wait states hamstring CPU's.

There is a new type of swap problem when running VM's, and needs a new rule for buying the next computer.

New Computer Rule: The next machine is going to have more memory than the CPU can handle so I don't have to think about it when creating VM's. This doesn't change the need for speed, so it's going to cost more...

Running into Disk Swap is so slow on a loaded machine that you can't get more than a few keystrokes without waiting 5 minutes.

VM's can be paused, moved around, and such when things get out of hand. But once the physical machine hits disk swap, you're lucky to get a few keystrokes every few minutes, can't pause the VM, and time to push the power button.

Coming soon, the next step might be to buy a machine to only run VM's, use ovirt instead of virt-manager, and have a separate desktop to start all over again. I don't think I like that at home, everything should be something you can use.

So that decides my second problem virt-manager (desktop), or ovirt an all VM machine. While the ovirt could have a VM that is your desktop, I'm not ready for that yet, and neither is ovirt.

However, ovirt is bringing in some other pieces, like LDAP user accounts. I'm manually editing passwd files, and keep trying to find something better than NIS which is overkill. Hopefully, finally, a useable LDAP server integrated with all the VM's. An LDAP server that I don't have to type sasl commands to make work. Webmin was the closest to an automatic interface. So from...openldap, Fedora Directory Server, 389, to FreeIPA...Worst case, /etc/passwd :(

Walked through installing FreeIPA, and had a failure. According to developer some interferences with 389, so will try again on FC 15...


So ready to start building the new cloud.