i’ve known about a product named virtualbox for quite awhile now..i never really looked into it any further than just installing it on my laptop. virtualbox is a GPL’d piece of software that pretty much attempts to clone vmware workstation. anyways, it’s put out by a company called innotek, that i just now found out was acquired by sun not too long ago.

so i should be all embracing this technology with open arms because i adore vms. it’s just that vmware is such a solid product, the interface is great and so on, it’s practically a industry standard…etc.. i could go on making excuses forever. i just love vmware products. and server & player are free and work cross-platform. so i don’t have a solid reason to jump ship on my beloved vmware products quite yet. and this is really odd behavior from me because i’ve become a sort of open source purist. i try to use OSS whenever humanly possible. arghh my hypocritical nature.

the roadmap for virtualbox alludes that a future version will be able to import vmware harddisks. that’s definitely awesome. i also toyed around with virtualpc for a few months out of curiosity on windows. it’s not really even in the same league as vmware.

this makes me ponder…lets say microsoft gave away ms office (whatever version) for free and it was cross platform. would i be using that instead of openoffice? being that the source is microsoft, i think it’s safe to say no. why? because it would reek of gimmickyness and i would think it was some sort of trial eval whatnot that would be revoked in a few months. something of that sort. there’s a sort of reassuring feeling with OSS, that once a piece of software is released out there it’s forever free. licenses can be changed, but forks can be made and the community will make products survive. and besides that i feel a sort of loyalty to products i use…i ran across staroffice in the late 90’s. i only dabbled with it then but was impressed. when openoffice was first released i was all about it and immediately started using it at work and at home. i actually did all of my class work for 3 years or so solely w/ openoffice.

final note, ran across an article that speculated that with the wide spread adoption of virtualization in the data center, server hardware sales will drop. well…most likely, but maybe it will be offset by the purchases of a few big iron systems to run the vm infrastructure.

todo list:
make VMs of
SLES (whatever the current version is) … various snapshots .. nagios and etc.
freedbsd 7.x
centos
oes2

vmware _is_ the best virtualization solution out there. and they give out free stuff.

and really with virtualization so well accepted nowadays…why bother dual booting anything? i mean i used to dual boot windows/linux until i changed over to linux entirely. but then unless you’re using a common datastore between the OS’s (and one that is readable by both) then you constantly have to try to remember where you have your data. and to avoid this annoyance you’re going to just stick with one OS. the other OS or two, or three, or whatever is just a curiosity you will boot up to show your friends. hey guys check it out i have linux!

currently i use the free vmware player to boot up a copy of windows xp on my linux host OS. and really i have this vm for only one reason…for sites that basically refuse to work on anything but IE.

what’s the best way to develop any type of technical solution? through an open committee of course. you don’t really need to meet in person…what for? with e-mail (mailing lists), messaging forums, and so on. look at the linux kernel development for example, but i’m not just talking about coding projects. i mean any technical endeavors in general. bringing forth ideas, procedures, methods, all out into the open for review. discarding items that do not work and keeping ones that will. then continue on further improvement.

i also believe in the rapid development model. jumping in and getting things going (with some planning of course). a quick prototype will tell you whether a project will be feasible or not fairly quickly. jumping in too soon may result in some wasted time, but i think the benefits outweigh the consequences. meeting and planning for far too long without enough action is a far worse scenario to me. the time for action ends up being condensed into a very short time frame. then you find out nothing is working as planned and then those involved have to work at breakneck speed, or the project is simply dubbed a failure.

i want to elaborate on this process further…

also i want to make note of mr. ray noorda of novell fame. he passed away in 2006. he truly was a genius businessman. he believed in competing in the marketplace and not trying to profit via litigation.

ok finally got mandriva 2008.1 installed on my laptop. i chose to do an upgrade over 2008.0. the install kept cutting out because of some dust specks on the dvd..do i ever learn this lesson? linux installs are very very particular about having spotless discs. i’ve had windows discs scratched all to hell and still install without complaining about file corruption…maybe that’s not a good thing.

anyways i hit 2 bugs that luckily were listed in the 2008.1 errata. one seemed fairly serious because the upgrade-install got caught in an infinite loop..which caused me mild panic. seems surprising that this bug made it to final release. mandrake/mandriva releases are always bashed for being buggy, but i don’t care. i love this distro to death. why? great “control panel”-esque management utilities. vast package selection. my 2nd distro of choice is suse. i know ubuntu is what’s hot nowadays, i dabbled with it some. i just don’t think that distro is geared towards me though. how’s that for elite?

anyways, here’s the 2 bugs:
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2008.1_Errata#Upgrade_from_previous_release_…
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2008.1_Errata#Volume_on-screen_display_stuck…

i like the new interface for audacious. i also like the updated media source utility in mandriva control center. it now does a lot of the work that easyurpmi did for you. i’m still not having any luck getting stable wireless connectivity with the new bcm43xx driver. i still have to fall back on using ndiswrapper. however, i think i might reload 2008.1 from scratch when i get some time. may fix a few issues…plus i really want to try kde4 but it appears those packages install to /opt. i left /opt a part of / and don’t have a lot of freespace on there. i had figured that mandriva did nothing with /opt ever. it’s used in solaris and suse…but oh well i won’t make that mistake again while partitioning.

also ran across a utility called “partimage”. it’s basically an opensource ghost type utility used for cloning workstations. it has stable support for the usual linux filesystems and experimental support for ntfs at this point. i’d like to test it out sometime.
homepage: http://www.partimage.org

i spend a terrible amount of time working on a deployment strategy for windows vista these days with benny and jim. tomorrow i’ll probably create a “base image” of a vista install from scratch and delve back into the sysprep. which is something i’ve put off for about 2 weeks out of frustration. a lot of things documented do not work as described in said documentation. my theory on that is a lot of it may have been true in earlier betas or whatever, but was changed somewhere along the (chaotic?) development cycle.

also working on a vbscript to rename the workstation automatically based upon the asset tag stored in bios. about half-way there. and finally, i’ve begun reading the documentation on zenworks personality migration.

built a notepad++ (probably one of the best gui text editors out there) bundle in ZCM. notepad++ is packaged with NSIS and the silent install switch is /S. tested the deployment a few times, works well.

a schlage access control panel has been non-functioning for a few weeks now. tech support was positive it was a IT networking issue. pretty much debunked that being a possibility. the contractor tried several different NIC modules (that are sort of like daughter cards to the main panel). one module partially worked then stopped functioning, none of the other ones came close to working. despite that, the tech support was still trying to rule out that the main panel might need replaced…today the panel was replaced and everything is working fine.

helped shawn mess around with a linux bootcd to alter a windows partition. chose mandriva one 2008. i was fairly impressed that upon default boot it auto-mounted the windows partition with (i’m fairly sure) read & write access using the ntfs-3g driver.

other than that i was checking out slashdot and was disappointed by a pointless fork of pidgin (which i’ve been using since it was like gaim 0.xx). i think it’s always a great option with open source software that you can fork projects. after all, more options are good. some good examples: xfree86 > x.org, mambo > joomla, ethereal > wireshark (sort of), sodipodi > inkscape, and so on. sometimes there’s very good reasons for making a split…in this case there doesn’t appear to be one. so basically a bunch of talented developers are splitting their efforts when they could do more good working together.

i’ve been working with benny on getting a method to remotely install and uninstall office 2007. i tried numerous times trying to get setup.exe /uninstall [product id] to work with no luck. in this case the product id should be 0030 for enterprise 2007. it would launch and complain that the office installation was corrupt. from some googling it seems to be a common problem. benny suggested i do a typical msiexec /x [uninstall string], which works beautifully…except it seems to be ignoring my suppress reboot option.

benny also introduced me to a an app called “MyUninstaller” which lists all the add/remove programs entries along with uninstall strings…awesome.

i am currently seriously studying for the ccent/ccna tests. i don’t have much physical access to real cisco equipment and i most likely won’t take classes. so that leaves me with lots of self-study and simulator usage.

exams seem to be 40-60 questions. i plan on taking the 2 test option ccent 640-822 then ccna 640-816. each test $100 each and passing score of 849 of 1000.

definitely need to understand: routing basics, subnetting

some resources:
http://www.ciscopress.com
http://www.cisco.com/go/prepcenter
http://www.cisco.com/go/ccna