Move to edmundtse.com – success!

Good news, my blog has a new home at edmundtse.com!

I’ve spent the past day and a bit moving my blog from being hosted at wordpress.com to my own domain. As at now, my blog has now been moved over to its new home, so this post will be the last one for this blog.

So if you want to subscribe to my blog, then please use its new home, because I foresee that this one won’t be updated any more. I wish that wordpress.com had a function that lets me divert existing visitors using HTTP 301.

Thank you for your support!

R.I.P suitsbeta, the death of SUITS server

If you’ve recently accessed Sydney University IT Society’s website, you might have noticed that it loaded rather slowly. About an hour later, I received an HTTP 500 while trying to get to the website, and it won’t even come up.

Later today, our IT guy sent an email with the subject “The death of suitsbeta”:

At approximately 1445 today, suitsbeta shut itself down, never to wake up again. Attempts were made to revive it by powering it up, but alas it failed to POST. Our thoughts go out to its family and friends.

Tim

So it turns out that our trusty server that hosted our website has kicked the bucket after its dedicated service to the society. Even though it has graduated from ‘beta’ so that the internal DNS name of ‘suits’ pointed to it, it will always be remembered as ‘suitsbeta’.

It was Pentium 4 1.6 GHz, with only 768MB of memory and less hard disk space than your average laptop.

I was fortunate enough to be with it in its final moments, and watched while it booted into the linux 2.6 kernel. It took minutes upon minutes to check even a few megabytes of the kernel image to see if it is initramfs.

Anyway, we are currently in search of a new server, and let’s look forward to a newer and better machine. Maybe even virtualise the server so disaster recovery is a bit less painful.

Microsoft Certification Exam – Windows Server Virtualization

Randomly browsing the Internet yesterday brought me to a interesting post – a free beta exam. This was posted up on the Channel 8, a students community supported by Microsoft.

So I took up the challenge, and signed up for the exam that’s on today. With one night’s preparation time, I wanted to see how far I can go at this exam. Wait – I don’t even know what’s in the exam!

A quick search led me to the exam topics for Exam 71-652: TS: Windows Server Virtualization, Configuring:

• Install Hyper-V (14%)
• Configure and Optimize Hyper-V (20%)
• Deploy Virtual Machines (30%)
• Manage and Monitor Virtual Machines (36%)

Ok, Now. Hyper-V sounds like it’s something to do with “hypervisor”. I do recall seeing this word somewhere… Oh well, I’ll just see what I make of it later tonight.

Back home, I pulled out a spare computer, and installed Windows Server 2008 on it. Following some instructions on TechNet, I tried to install Hyper-V, only to find that this feature is only available to 64-bit installations of Server 2008.

No, I can’t just reinstall a 64-bit Server 2008, because my test machine was the Acer Laptop with a Pentium-M (x86) processor. It just so happens that I don’t have any computers that had 64-bit capability! Not even my Lenovo V100 – it has the first generation of the Intel Core processors, so it’s only 32-bit.

I guess there was nothing more I could do. I went back to studying for the uni exams next week.

Today, armed with a general knowledge of computers, I took the exam at Excom Education Sydney. Well I have played around with several virtualisation tools before – Connectix/Microsoft Virtual PC, vmware server and player, Basilisk II, PearPC, (k)qemu, innoTek/Sun VirtualBox, and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, but nothing really specific.

At the end of the exam, I survived. I think.

But all I can say is that the focus of Hyper-V is not just another virtualisation tool, it is something that offers much more in terms of enterprise integration and management. (Think ESX in VI3). It’s not just about making something work, it’s also about best ways to optimise for performance and availability.

Even though the exam was not easy, it was fun. If you’re thinking of taking this exam, you better hurry because the beta period ends on June 23!

My New Toy: PCI Gigabit SOHO Network Storage NAS-01G

I recently got a new NAS device from Hong Kong, and decided to move my file server role from my PC to this neat little network device. Essentially, it is a Now I can turn off my PC, and still be able to access my files from my laptop. For some reason, entry-level NAS devices targeted at the general home user are not very common in Australia. In Hong Kong, there was even a mass review of similar devices from the PC3 Magazine (in which this model unfortunately didn’t make an appearance).

Ok, let’s start by taking a look at the box. I always read the box before I buy something – at least I know what I might be getting. Some of the features are quite interesting: Gigabit LAN, FTP, Web, Print server, and it even has DLNA compatible media server plus bittorrent client. Something that might be a little confusing is “JumboFrame. Initially I thought that it referred to an excessively bulky physical enclosure, but it turns out to be an enlarged TCP frame, so that more data squeezed into the same number of transmission units.

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Hosting with Windows Server 2008

I had a great time at the Windows Server 2008 Hosting Roadshow in Sydney today. Since this event was quite fully booked out, I was actually quite lucky to be able to register for this event. Perhaps it was the Melbourne Cup? Thanks to the Philip Meyer and Jorke Odolphi, I had the chance to see some of the best features of the new IIS 7 and Windows Server 2008 working in harmony.

We used Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, to run two Windows Server guest machines at the same time. It’s really quite convenient since you now don’t need an entire computer lab to play with Windows networking. We had a tour around the new IIS 7, including the new modularised design. A fresh installation is secure by default with only the minimum number of modules. Less junk means less things to go wrong.

Creating, backing up and restoring 4000 web sites was really not that tedious after all. It only took 30 seconds to create them all! It can even be done using the command line.

Perhaps the most interesting feature that opens up a new world of possibilities is that IIS 7 now stores its configuration as an XML file rather than a metabase as it has done in the past. This makes the configuration much easier to reproduce and to restore. It allows what’s called “Shared Configuration”, where multiple servers in a farm uses the same configuration so that all configured servers can now host the same websites. Again, it really isn’t that difficult to set up!