Virtualization Hardware Purchase

After several months of planning and working out a plan for our company to make a move towards virtualization the PO's were signed and hardware is being ordered. The main server was ordered today along with our VMware licenses. A SAN is ready to be ordered - just have to cross paths with our local vendor to get those final details worked out.

We are moving ahead slowly and won't be taking full advantage of all that VMware has to offer. The primary goal is server consolidation at this point. The savings we get from knocking out a few of our underutlized servers should make management a little more open to further VMware investments with a Phase II hopefully coming next year. Phase II is where we build in the real redundancy and virtualize even more of our servers. Phase I just has us getting the low hanging fruit.

As for redundancy - we will only have one workhorse server running ESX. For Phase I though it will only run about 6 VMs or so. We will use a 3rd party backup product, probably esXpress, to hot backup the VMs to another storage location. In the event of a host failure one of the older boxes will be available to bring online and at least bring up some VMs to lessen the impact while the host server is repaired. While not the spiffy automatic roll over we could have had - it will allow fairly quick recovery by restoring those backups.

I am looking forward to the hardware getting there and getting some of this stuff setup! We've been using VMs in test for quite some time now. We have two VMs in production now, but the move to ESX Server will be the first major push for us. Should be fun!

HP nx7400 Display Issues... Again!

Last fall work provided me with a new HP nx7400. The thing seemed great at first and then the display issues started. Occasionally when the thing hibernated the LCD display wouldn't come back. Power off, power on and sometimes that worked. Other times you had to pull the battery, do the dance and sacrifice a chicken to get it to come back. About two months ago it finally came to the point where nothing I did would get it to come back. That resulted in a return to the warranty depot for an LCD replacement/repair.

Now, today - I just had the same issue happen. No LCD. The laptop boots, you can hear it booting. But there is absolutely no display. I will call them again in the morning and see what happens - probably another trip back to the warranty depot for the laptop. Unfortunately, this is about the worse possible time for this issue to resurface. Over the next few weeks I will need to be working from home a bit more than usual and that laptop was the only machine I have that actually runs Windows on it. Hopefully the repair will once again be quick and I won't be without it for too long.

Windows World Test Environment

While kicking back this weekend I started re-building my Windows test environment I have in VMs. It had been a bit since I had used it - last practicing disaster recovery for AD and Exchange 2000/2003. While all my test servers were functioning, I couldn't really be sure of the state they were in. So I shuffled a few things around and built up two Windows 2000 Domain Controllers, two Windows 2003 Server member servers and an XP client. I started with 2000 AD as it is time for me to play a bit with some AD upgrades. I also need to get Exchange into the mix when I have a moment.

Usually I just populate my test environments with a handful of accounts. This time I wanted to get more in the ballpark of 100 accounts up and running. I ended up using the dsadd tool from the Windows 2003 box to add the accounts to AD. By using Excel I was able to build up 100 dsadd command lines to paste into a script file. Very brute force, but it works! When I get time I might tweak the script a bit and build it up via a for loop to make future script tweaks easier. Here is the dsadd command I used (posting here more as a reminder to myself than usefulness to others):

dsadd user CN=test10,CN=Users,DC=ANSALON,DC=KRYNN,DC=local /
-samid test10 -upn test10 -pwd insertpasshere -fn Test -ln Ten /
-display "Test Ten" -s GOLDMOON

Seems to have worked quite well.

Week of Releases

Looks like everyone is releasing software this week! Microsoft released service pack 2 for Windows 2003 Server and Red Hat released RHEL5. Good stuff! I haven't had much time other than to read feature lists and release notes on either release yet. SP2 for Windows seems like a typical service pack with a couple of features thrown in (I thought MS was going to quit releasing features in service packs!) and RHEL looks to have made several improvements - though a minimum requirement of 1GB of RAM? Apparently folks are getting it to install with 256MB if you do text mode and minimal install. We'll see how that goes once CentOS releases their spin...

DST Change - The Day After

So far, so good. I had written a script last wek to check the time on all the servers (Windows and Linux) and email them to me as a text file. That gave me a very quick way to see the state of affairs this morning when I woke up. All the servers looked good - they had all updated the time correctly as expected. I went into work this morning anyways, as there is a manual timer I needed to change which has no concept that DST changed and probably never will (it has been on the list to be replaced with something that uses NTP anyways, so no major loss there). I logged on from a machine or two, made sure my proxy auth was still working (I have a squid proxy tied into AD which is very sensitive of time drift due to kerberos). Everything seemed good.

So hopefully tomorrow will just be a million questions about why some calendar appointments are off (after the userbase certainly ignored the emails I sent on the subject when we initially patched the client OS's) and probably a machine or two we just forgot to update. I am keeping my fingers crossed.

On a humorous note - I popped on Lady Elfshadow's laptop this morning and saw the time was off! In all the prep for keeping work machines updated I had neglected to update her iBook. Easy fix, just check the available software updates, tell it to grab the DST fix and a reboot later it was good to go.

Firefly loot ordered...

I couldn't wait. One day was enough waiting to make sure it wasn't an impulse purchase. Here's what I ordered:

Serenity Official Visual Companion
Firefly Official Companion (Vol 1)
Finding Serenity

Since I am cheap it could be many days before I get them as I chose the Super Saver Shipping option... Something to look forward to!

Firefly

My friends turned me on to the now canceled television show Firefly (and later the movie Serenity). One of them had the series on DVD, as well as the movie. I watched them pretty quickly and I ended up getting for my own enjoyment later on. I rarely watch shows more than once - just a few movies are on the list that I tend to enjoy time after time. Well, here I am not even a month later and rewatching the series. I am enjoying just as much the second time through!

I think it is the SciFi/Western thing that I like. Sort of a wild west feel out in space. A combination that just seems to work for me. I enjoy most of the characters in the series as well, which does go far to make it interesting for multiple viewings. A really good series - too bad it was canceled.

To help fill my need for more Firefly I think I will pick up a few of the books off of Amazon. I have some gift cards built up and I think I could get most of the highly rated ones in one swoop. I will give myself a few days to avoid it being an impulse buy and probably order them up. Already have them in my cart!

Month of PHP Bugs

March is the Month of PHP Bugs. The Project's goal is to improve PHP security. The bugs they are announcing each day are bugs with the core PHP code itself, not just poor coding practices of various PHP applications out there. A lot of this was sparked when Stefan Esser resigned from the PHP Security Response Team several months ago. (You can read an interview with him here.) He felt issues were not being addressed promptly enough or being ignored - and so we now have the Month of PHP Bugs.

My thoughts on PHP are conflicted. I used to be a big fan of PHP apps, they seemed to solve a lot of problems for me at work or other places (i.e. this blog is PHP based). But then I started to do some work with the Fedora Infrastructure team who had a poor opinion of PHP based on its security track record. I still use PHP applications, but I do tend to look for alternatives when I can. My PHP work apps are internal applications and safely behind the firewall. The publicly exposed PHP apps I use tend to be for personal use and are installed at my hosting provider who provides me the lazy path to updates through the one-click installs. So at least the path to upgrade is just a few clicks away.

In either case - looks like March might be a busy time for admins with a large number of publicly exposed PHP applications.

WordPress 2.1.1 Issues

Looks like WordPress had a breach in their security and someone was able to add some exploit code to some downloads of the 2.1.1 release. Not all downloads were affected, but WordPress has released 2.1.2 to help eliminate any issues. My host had just recently upgraded their on-click installs to 2.1.1 - looks like another time procrastination paid off as I had not updated yet! You can read about the issue here.

VMware Server and SQL Server

I negelected to update this post regarding the issues we had been facing with Microsoft SQL 2000 running on VMware Server 1.0.1. Despite several attempts and different tactics tried I could not get the ERP upgrade the developer was working on to work without experiencing SQL errors.

I decided to try the eval copy of ESX Server. So I spent time shuffling off the VMs running on the current VMware Server (running CentOS 4.4 as the host) to my other one running on Windows. I then rebuilt the same hardware as an eval ESX 3.0.1 server. I moved the SQL VM back to the ESX server, made sure things were running good and turned it back over to the developer to test the ERP upgrade.

This time it worked flawlessly. The upgrade proceeded with no issues and completed. The developer has been happily working out the normal upgrade bugs with the ERP upgrade - which were not related the SQL issues at all, just broken customizations and such.

We are certainly glad it worked and I guess this just goes to reinforce that one should only run ESX Server in production.

VMware Server 1.0.2 Released

VMware released VMware Server 1.0.2 today, the release notes are here. I haven't had the chance to get it installed anywhere yet, but for those with more time it might be of interest.