Nuclear Weasels

The company I work for has spent a year trying to use Virtuozzo for its server Virtualisation, after a year of poor service and several interesting issues we have made the decision to move away from Virtuozzo as a virtualisation platform.

In the time we spent on Virtuozzo Microsoft released Hyper-V, if they had released it before we started looking at Virtuozzo we would probably have been an early adopter (despite the fact we are corporately standardised on Server 2003). Our previous foray in to the world of Virtualisation was conducted using Micrsoft Virtual Server 2005 which was pretty bland feature wise which was one reason for trying out Virtuozzo. The benefit of hindsight now shows me that Virtual Server 2005 would have done as a platform for the past year.

Now that Hyper-V has been released we are once again looking at the possibility of using Microsoft Virtualisation Products as our Virtualisation Platform, I plan to release a couple of blog entries about how we’re going about doing this and highlighting anything interesting I come accross for you folks to read.

We’re installing Hyper-V on a Dell Power Edge PE1950 rack mount server, the basic spec of the machine is

• Quad Core Xeon running 2.33 Ghz
• 4 Gigabytes of RAM
• Dual 73 Gigabyte 15K RPM SAS drives
• 1 Terabyte SAN storage
• Dual NICs

Already I can see room for improvement on that specification, sadly the box wasn’t originally purchased to be a Virtualisation work horse. So I’ll be looking up the cost of a RAM upgrade (12 / 16 gig) plus perhaps a second processor to add a little more computation power.

As I type this the server is booting up in to Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, the 64 Bit version obviously as Hyper-V doesn’t run on the 32 Bit version. My initial impression of Server 2008 is that it is much slicker than previous versions, as yet I’ve not found any new features which would cause me to make the jump to Server 2008 as the corporate server OS choice however its early days yet.

Next task - Installing Hyper-V.

Despite my griping about missing features on the pre-alpha site I feel that Bob deserves a big thumbs up for what he’s done with his Ruby on Rails blog engine Jibber. It’s never easy bootstrapping yourself up in a new language especially when you have to do it without the help of others (Sure he read books, but neither Marcus or I could help him and we obviously count more :P).

Jibber is shaping up to become usable product.

Well done Bob!

~Dan

I say we should all embrace the following method of doing Word Press Upgrades.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing/Updating_WordPress_with_Subversion#Tracking_Stable_Versions

It simply rocks.

~Dan

Today I ripped out the authentication system I had been writing for Theseus and replaced it with a bright and shiny link to the OpenID system. From now all on FE sites I write will use OpenID for its authentication system so we can begin to cut down on User Account hell.

In the near future I’ll write a short tutorial on how I implemented OpenID.

~Dan

One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do as a writer is take someone elses character and start writing with them, within the RPG world its usually frowned up on to do things like that however at times its necessary.

One such necessity is to write for one Alexander Stark the new president of Futility’s End.

The character was created by a friend of mine who sadly is taking some time away from writing, unfortunately the position of the character in question means that someone has to take over writing or the back story of the affiliate won’t be able to move along. With the Civil War arc now in its closing stages it is necessary for me to start moving the back story along, I hope to release the first fiction featuring Stark in the next day or two.

However before I do that I have to find his voice.

Hello President Stark, are you out there?

~Dan

Today I stand, at least metaphorically, on the edge of a new dawn for Futility’s End. The product of 5 years planning and plotting finally pays off as Futility’s End goes to war against the corrupt master of its destiny Samuel George Kirok.

Throughout the plot we have struggled to keep his identity a secret whilst at the same time leaving enough clues laying around for people to guess who he is. For those who haven’t been keeping up with the FE I’ll clue you in on the secret.

Sam Kirok is Emperor Tiberius AKA Mirror Kirk.

The arch nemesis of one Admiral Bryan Cash a man who’s lived through several life times and enough crap to kill your average gentleman. By now though that man is dead, finally laid to rest within Futility’s End never to grace the forum for your viewing pleasure again. Albert bless his soul has played a blinder for the FE on this one, not only has he picked up his brothers mantle he’s managed to surpass all expectations of what he could achieve, single handledly writing where needed over the past 6 months has quite obviously left him feeling a little drained.

He is now taking a well deserved break from Futility’s End, before he goes though I’d like to ensure he knows one thing.

Damn dude, you write some cool stuffs!

Anyway back to the edge I mentioned earlier.

As I take the reigns of command again it falls to me to steer this group towards something better than it currently is, in my mind I can see a plan crystalising which to some extent relies on the efforts of those people already in Futility’s End. It relies on them because our main priority has to be attracting new blood to our games, we’ve felt the pinch of real life this year with a good chunk of our players having to scale back their activities a fair bit. The big question is how do we get these new people?

Answer. Ambassadors!

The best way of recruiting for Futility’s End has always been word of mouth and the way that people get fired up over what they write, its electrifying to realise you’re writing something thats uniquely part of a greater whole. I feel that a few of our current players could be trained to grab people’s attention this way, not to out and out recruit them just to be prepared on how to sell what we’re doing.

The only problem with this plan is a little thing called arrogance. Over the past year I’ve heard several critisims about how people in FE are holier than thou in their attitude - that really ought to stop, if it doesn’t then its sad to say that the group doesn’t need you in it. Yes FE is cool, it rocks and all that but its not automatically better than everything else. We have to make it that way and we do that through our writing not through waxing lyrical about the affiliate. I’ve said it before to people if we write well then Futility’s End will sell itself.

Another item on my to do list is figuring out some way of better disseminating the information about what Futility’s End is, our InfoBase works wonderfully well for players immersed in our lore, however it remains almost impenetrable by those who have yet to join us. The website will be the vehicle for this task, whilst there may be some apprehension I plan to replace the current forum and InfoBase systems with a custom written application designed to link directly in to the main site. I want all FE information to be available from one central site not spread out across disparate offerings.

Thirdly there is something else we ought to concentrate on and that is the rigor with which we deal with things, another complaint I’ve heard banded about is how things have been sent to GM’s or the Quad and have never been dealt with. Obviously given how we work the Quad doesn’t want to be micromanaging how everyone does things but we do need to put something in place to ensure that people don’t drop through the cracks.

Well, as much as I would like to write some more on the future of FE I think I ought to leave it there. At least until the site comes out of maintenance

~Dan

Relevant information for me, thought it might be of interest to you.

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/mirjam/archive/2007/08/06/renaming-a-moss-server.aspx

I thought I would share this nugget with you all as its kept my brain mangled for a few hours and I’d like to save someone else the trouble.

Your swyx server must be on the same VLan as the phones in order to run the phone controller.

It works via broadcast which does not work over router bounderies no matter what you are told by swyx themselves.

~Dan

This week we had reason to call in an Engineer from 3Com to help us fault find the issues we’ve been suffering on our network for the past 6 months. 

The problem we’ve experienced is this.

Randomly a client on our network will loose network connectivity, they will be unable to access any resource on the network. Running the command arp -d * would allow the machine access the network again for a short period of time before the issue would occur again. The real difficultly was that this problem would affect users randomly for random periods of time. There was no correlation between the software or hardware levels of the machine, and no correlation between network port on the switch and the problem either.

After many months of pulling my own hair out we purchased support days from 3Com.

Sufficed to say, I’m happy that our problem boggled the engineers mind too.

In the course of his investigations it became apparent that my own knowledge of networking barely scratches the surface of what you can do with devices like our 5500G’s, it is certainly a shame when you realise our setup was so simplistic we could have probably done the same job with a few hubs and a single switch.

That is changing now given the wealth of knowledge which has been imparted to both Barry (My collegue) and myself by the engineer. We’re now trying to get our network set up and vlan’d correctly so that our servers, desktops and phones are all virtually separated.

My first bug bear is getting our phone system working on a different VLan.

More on that later maybe.

~Dan

I’ve injured my AC joint again, probably a grade one tear.

Read more about the pain here.

~Dan