BRIAN LENIHAN was in Washington on the 8th of Oct 2010 adderssing the IMF, makes for an interesting read,
Read this paragraph,
In relation to the situation in Ireland, the Irish Government has moved to address the regulatory failures that were central to the financial crisis: regulatory structures have been streamlined and strengthened, with the Irish Central Bank assuming responsibility for financial regulation; regulatory powers and functions are being enhanced; and the Central Bank is increasing its staffing resources and enhancing its expertise to pursue a more intrusive supervisory approach backed by credible enforcement.
Street view was finally released for Ireland a couple of weeks ago. I remember cyclying past the Google car on my way to work one morning. Well it made it onto the maps. Woot!
Many people (read 'geeks') have heterogeneous environments with a Mac and/or Windows and/or Linux box running in their homes.
I have a similar one and I wanted to backup my mac's /Users directory (I used to do it on my iPod, but my music got bigger). So I thought, well, I have about 100gigs empty on the windows box, why not use it!
So I tried the simplest thing. I shared a folder on windows (gave full permissions to it for the account I use, no one else.) Then mounted the folder in OS X, and started copying the /Users folder on it. It worked happily for a while, but then failed while it was trying to copy a file with a name like "abc|def.txt" -- problems with file name characters. I had to look for other options...
What I needed was to format a portion of that NTFS formatted hard drive as HFS and that would do it. So I reached for "Disk Utility" and followed these steps: - Mount the windows shared folder Tip: If possible try to connect over a wired Lan. I tried to create a big image (about 20gig) over the 802.11g network and it timeout twice. I connected the two via ethernet cable and it worked fine and fast. (obviously) - Start "Disk Utility" - Hit "New Image" - Save As: (name of the image you are creating i.e. it will be .dmg) - Size: GB (Tip: I read somewhere, that if you want to pre-allocate disk space for backup of files, a rule of thumb is allocate 3 times the space you currently use. It sounded reasonable and I did so.) -Encryption: none -Format: read/write disk image -Hit "Create"
This will effectively: -Create a volume called /Volumes/ that is visible as "Mac OS Extended" of the size that you created. -You will see a file .dmg in the windows share.
Now I had the bytes ready, in the format I wanted, I just needed a tool transfer stuff. I tried a few but am currently using iBackup: - iBackup - pretty good: you can select specific files/folder to backup - rsync: I have previously used rysnc in shell. Works great, very powerful with the switches e.g.: rsync -av --delete --exclude "temp" --exclude ".Trash" - RsyncX - basic UI for rsync; but can't exclude sub folders - Other software I've heard raves about are SuperDuper, CarbonCopyCloner (CCC), etc.
The whole thing is pretty cool, so I thought I'd share it. Hope it helps ...
Xen is an opensource hypervisor. Version 4 has been released on the 7th of april 2010.
One of the main new feature concerns high availability. With the intergation of project Remus code, Xen now supports fault tolerance for virtual machines, using live transactional synchronization of VM state between physical servers.
Unfortunatly, Debian is only shipped with Xen version 3.2 for current stable Lenny, and version 3.4 for next stable Squeeze. Let's see how to install Xen 4 on Lenny.
Current system inventory
The target Xen platform we want to upgrade is discribed here (sorry for my non french readers, theses 2 documents are not translated yet):
Despite the use of cluster stack in the second case, installation will follow the same steps for both architectures.
But we have to take care about some things in order to complete migration:
We are about to upgrade Xen hypervisor. We will also have to upgrade Dom0 kernel (during my tests, Debian 2.6.26 kernel crashed while booting with Xen4 and I don't have time to investigate it for now).
Because we update Dom0 kernel, we must build a new DRBD module accordingly
Finally, because we'll build Xen from sources, we have to clean Debian install in order to avoid libraries conflicts.
All compilations will be done on a specific computer. For obvious security reasons, it's of course out of question to compile Xen on the Dom0. Remember ? "Never install dev tools on productions servers" ;-)
Environment setup
Inside our dedicated VM, tou must install needed packages for compilation:
mkdir ~/Xen
cd ~/Xen
wget http://bits.xensource.com/oss-xen/release/4.0.0/xen-4.0.0.tar.gz
tar -xzf xen-4.0.0.tar.gz
cd xen-4.0.0/
make xen
make tools
As we'll use Debian provided Dom0 kernel, we don't need to build it. The make stubdom command is therefore not required.
Binaries have copied into dist directory. You'll find a script called install.sh which will take care of copying files in destination system tree.
System files are located dist/install. In order to make deployment easier, we'll build a tar.gz archive from direcory dist.
But first, we have to modify some files to respect Debian's usages for configuration files stroage: we have to move etc/sysconfig to etc/default.
Then, we have to adapt init scripts.
Adaptation de l'installation aux normes Debian
cd dist/install/etc
mv sysconfig default
cd init.d
Replace sysconfig with default (line 23) in xend.
Replace sysconfig with default (line 38) in xendomains.
Tar.gz archive creation for Xen 4
tar -czf xen4.tar.gz dist
Then, you can copy this archive on each dom0 you want to update. Let's deal now with DRBD module.
DRBD compilation
Our next dom0 kernel will be 2.6.32 from backports repos. We have to build it. As our dev VM does not use it, we must specify kernel version module-assistant will have to use to build against.
Now reboot the server. If everything is fine, you can uninstall all xen related packages as well as the old kernel.
As usual, do not forget to backup your Xen configuration !
Once done, you can install DRBD module and Xen4 archive:
Without the last command, xend process will be unable to communicate with hypervisor and therefore, nothing will work. You may have to add some others modules in /etc/modules:
Adding other Xen modules
blktab
xen-evtchn
Now it's time to restore Xen's config files. Finally, setup xen related services start xend and xendomains.
When done and before rebooting on hypervisor, you should install some libraries. They are needed for Xen to work, but have been uninstalled by Debian (because you remove packages).
