Just got my notification from Vodafone, my Blackberry storm has been dispatched and should be delievered by courier at some point tomorrow.
Once I get it I’ll do some sort of blog entry on it I’m sure, until then - here’s to my last day with my N95 8gig.
~Dan
Yesterday I wrote about Hyper-V and how we plan to trail it, for those of you who haven’t read that entry yet you can find it here.
We pick up today with a base Server 2008 install, we’re running 64 Bit Enterprise level Server 2008 to which we have applied all available updates (Especially the Hyper-V update KB950050!). Next task is to install the Hyper-V role to the server, in my case this required a reboot of the system (Not that it should matter, you shouldn’t be running other roles on your Hyper-V server).
Once the server was running I fired up the Hyper-V console and took a look around, the basics were all there. The ability to create and modify VM’s and the ability to connect to them.
Rather than jumping straight in and creating a new VM from scratch I chose to migrate one of our existing Virtual Servers, Amy. This server used to be our main Exchange server for our perimeter network it was replaced by a hardware server a little over a month ago. As Amy has not yet been removed from Active Directory I thought it would be a good test box to move over, especially considering the other candidates were our main Database Server and our SharePoint 2003 server!
After detaching the VHD from the old server I copied it accross to the Hyper-V box, the size of the disk meant it took about 30 minutes to complete so I disappeared off to grab a coffee. Once the hard drive was on the Hyper-V server I created a new Hyper-V VM with some fairly basic specs and attached it to the existing VHD file. I was surprised to find the VM booted first time (With warnings about mouse capturing not working, you really need to know your keyboard shortcuts for a VHD upgrade).
Once it was up and running a spent a few minutes familiarising myself with the remote access feature of Hyper-V. In Virtual Server 2005 we were forced to use a VMRC server to connect to the server if RDP wasn’t running which was a somewhat clunky thing which had a habbit of locking up on our Virtual Server 2005 box. In Hyper-V that has changed, it now appears that there is a souped up version of Remote Desktop running to give you console access to the server. Its a welcome change to the old way of doing things and a major thumbs up to the use of Hyper-V in our environment.
Installing the Hyper-V Integration components to the VM took a few minutes, it required a reboot in order to upgrade the HAL on the Virtual Machine something that was automatic under Windows Server 2003 but apparently needs to be done manually on Vista or earlier clients.
One final reboot later I set the IP address of the virtual machine and everything was back to normal, more importantly it was it was about a bazillion times faster* than it was previously.
Given the success of the initial migration I will be looking at Migrating some of our lower importance VM’s over from VM-Ware.
More on that later.
~Dan
* Please note, no scientific tests were carried out to reach this number. Instead I used the pull numbers from thin air randomiser routine instead.
I was just reading up on Server 2008 Release 2, it appears that it will be 64 Bit only.
Looks like a lot of work for me to get our systems on 64 bit hardware.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/r2.aspx
~Dan
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
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
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