Archive for May, 2009

Kubuntu USB Creator

I worked late into the morning hours on this mock-up for a Kubuntu bootable USB Creator. There currently is one for regular Ubuntu, written mostly in python and of course in GTK+. I am gonna try to port it to Qt. Let me know if you would like to help out as my c++ is sort of like my French i.e. not good.

kubuntuUSBCreator

Openfiler Review

I run an installation of VMWare ESXi which is really a great product for server based virtualization. My only complaint is that there is no Linux admin client.  So I have to keep an XP VM around all the time to administer it.  The only reason that I bring this up is that ESXi needs a good chunk of space for its datastore.  Well you can certainly hook up a whole bunch of physical drives.  You can also set up an expensive fibre channel SAN.  Well, both solutions will work, but obviously have drawbacks.

Enter Openfiler.  Openfiler is a Linux distro based off of rPath Linux.  It offers an awesome web-front-end and supports: rsync, smb/cifs, NFS, WebDAV, FTP and iSCSI protocols.  So as we can see, this is a great way to easily set up a NAS for a media box or for your network based backup solution.  You can also tie it into directory services like Active Directory or LDAP, but I haven’t tried this.  It also has some of the easiest software RAID setup I have used.

So these sreenshots are showing some of the steps in setting up an iSCSI volume from 2 virtual hard disks on a VM and two of the partitions are in RAID-1.  This of course is not really a realistic setup and is for illustration purposes only

Openfiler is available as an ISO for installing on a beige box, as a VMWare VM as well as many other kinds of VMS

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